Overview

The Soviet authorities denied the Besermans the right to self-identify. For decades, their language was dismissed as merely a dialect of Udmurt, a closely related language spoken by a different ethnic group. Only in 2021 was Beserman officially recognized as a separate language—by then, some fifteen years had already passed since intergenerational transmission had come to an end. This grammar demonstrates why such recognition matters. Drawing on many years of fieldwork within the Beserman community, it offers a comprehensive portrait of the language: its phonology, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, information structure, and pragmatics. More than 3,700 carefully selected examples bring these features to life and show that Beserman is, beyond doubt, a language worthy of study in its own right.

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9789004756694

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Timofey Arkhangelskiy, Ph.D. (2012), is a research fellow at the University of Hamburg. He has conducted fieldwork- and corpus-based research on the Volga-Kama languages, with a focus on Udmurt and Beserman. His other interests include the development of linguistic corpora for language documentation. Maria Usacheva, Ph.D. (2012), is an independent researcher. Since 2004, she has participated in fieldwork on Beserman as well as three other Uralic languages. She is the editor of a Beserman thesaurus (2017) and a leading member of an informal collaboration dedicated to the documentation of Beserman, which resulted in this grammar. Maria Cheremisinova is pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin (since 2023). After gaining experience in two fieldwork projects on other Uralic languages as a student, she took part in several Beserman fieldwork trips, where she worked on conditionals, comparative/attenuative polysemy, and verbal actionality.

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