Welcome to Rureg, the Acoustic Data Base of Russian Regional Speech! Since 1991 we¹ have been conducting field work in various Regionen of Russia to gain a living picture of the linguistic, social, and cultural situation recording interviews with local speakers. Entering RuReg you are invited to take part in our encounters and conversations, and to gain access to all these materials for non-commercial use and for research purposes.

How does the recorded speech signal reach our ear? There are two ways (cf. Instructions ), one a) for all people interested in Russia (even without knowing Russian), and one b) for scientific exploration.

a) using the tab Expeditions (or the red point on the map, for short) leading to one of the expeditions. You´ll find information about our planning process, about our motivations and the adventures of travelling. You´ll get insight into the history of the region and some characteristic traits of the inhabitants. You´ll hear speech samples and come to know cultural details.

b) using the tab Search the unrestricted and easy way to the recordings (cf Data structure ). These can be operated track by track using different searching strategies, the results being evoked acoustically online and downloaded, all operations facilitated by two newly developed technologies: (1) annotations making use of thematic, textual, linguistic, situational, voice as well as social criteria² , and (2) the oscillogram accepting user´s marking of the fragment to be processed. This fragment can be stored and provided with a code that leads you – and whoever is given the code – back to the respective place in the data base. This is the technique of acoustic citation³ , and this technique is applied for the speech samples in Expeditions/Speech-Samples.

The expeditional section of RuReg as well as the construction of the Data Base are being accomplished at the Ruhr University Bochum, the Hochschule Bochum, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the University of Sarrey and the Vjatka State University of Humanities in Kirov, financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG, Grant Nr. SA-214, 215, 216.

Thanks to our Russian interviewees! They generously let us take part in their life and the life of their region, and they activated the whole of their eloquence to evoke a living human picture in our mind. It´s our deepest satisfaction to forward this treasure.

 

¹ Christian Sappok, head of the project
Leonid L. Kasatkin, Rozalija F. Kasatkina, Moscow
Elena N. Moškina, Vera V. Podrušnjak, Kirov
Aleksandr M. Krasovitsky, Sarrey and Oxford, Ludger Paschen, Leipzig
Marion Krause, Margje Post, David Pineda, Bergen
² developed by Ch. Sappok, Seminar für Slavistik/Lotman Institut,
and the Chair of Tanja Anstatt, Ruhr Universität Bochum.
³ developed in the Laboratory for Data Bases, Katrin Brabender,
Andreas Koch, Nadja Kühl, Hochschule Bochum.

from left to right: R. F. Kasatkina, a dialect speaker from Leka,
Ch. Sappok, L.L.Kasatkin (photographed by C. Odé in 1991)