The award is an open competition among projects that support and develop ethnic languages of the Russian Federation. Its objective is to raise the prestige of significant citizens’ and professional initiatives for preserving and promoting the country's language diversity. This year, 250 applications from 55 regions were submitted. The award ceremony was held in Moscow with the support of the Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs.
Irina Novak's monograph is based on her Dr.Sci. dissertation. An output produced by the studies is a modern classification map of the Karelian language, representing all its supradialects, dialects, and sub-dialect groups. The scholar has thus finalized, using modern methods and technologies, the large-scale work started in the 1930s by Dmitry Bubrikh, the founder of Finno-Ugric studies in Russia.
The idea to analyze the Karelian dialectal system was prompted to Irina Novak by her colleagues, primarily the well-known linguist Nina Zaitseva. She noticed that KarRC RAS Scientific Archives hold materials collected for a Karelian dialect atlas over several decades in settlements of Karelia and the Tver Region. It is symbolic that eight years ago, when the Keyword Award was first held, Nina Grigoryevna became its laureate with the "Veps Corpus” project.
Preparation of the Karelian Dialectological Atlas started under the leadership of Professor Dmitry Bubrikh. The edition was approved for print in the 1950s, but was only published in 1997. Moreover, only part of the material was included in the atlas. E.g., the questionnaires consisted of up to 2000 items covering various aspects, such as phonetics, vocabulary, morphology, but ultimately only a tenth of this material made it into the atlas.
Obviously, the material was processed by researchers but not included in the atlas. As a result, Dmitry Bubrikh’s original primary cause – to develop a dialect classification for the Karelian language based on this material – was failed. This happened because the amount of the material was enormous, and processing it manually was simply impossible. It would have taken several years of work of a large research team, – noted Irina Novak.
She proposed digitizing all the data, encoding it, and processing it using mathematical methods of cluster analysis. The work was carried out jointly with researchers from the Institute of Applied Mathematical Research KarRC RAS, particularly Natalia Krizhanovskaya. Processing information at a speed unattainable by humans, the computer offers various analytical options. Specialists evaluate them and pick the option most suitable for the Karelian dialectal system. This approach has enabled scientists to work out a classification for the Karelian language based on the entire dataset. As a result, the goal set for the institute’s team nearly a century ago has now been achieved with the help of digital technology.
The resulting classification is somewhat different from the one presented in the 1970s and considered traditional for the Karelian language, but linguistically it has the most solid footing. Importantly, although the material was collected in the middle of the previous century, the dialect map remains relevant for the modern Karelian language. This conclusion follows from the results of the author’s thirteen expeditions in the Republic of Karelia, Tver, Leningrad, and Murmansk Regions.
Irina Novak worked on her dissertation research for the past ten years and defended it successfully for the Dr.Sci. degree in 2024. In March 2025, the electronic monograph "The Karelian Language Landscape in the Dialectometric Paradigm" was published. It was this work that was submitted for the nationwide Keyword Award.
– I believe that such recognition – the All-Russian Public Award – is extremely important for us, scholars of the humanities. Especially for linguists who work with the languages that are gradually fading into history. Such victories highlight the importance of documenting and preserving our country's numerous languages for future generations. For me personally, being an ethnic Tver Karelian, it matters even more. Such public awards empower researchers and so feel in a way even weightier than purely scientific prizes, – summarized Irina Novak.
Photos: I.P. Novak and House of Peoples of Russia
