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Joint research with St. Petersburg, Russia


Since 1991, Tjeerd de Graaf has worked on joint research projects in the field of phonetics and ethnolinguistics with colleagues of the University of St. Petersburg and the Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation. He became coordinator of a number of collaboration projects with various institutions throughout the Russian Federation, which were and are financially supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO),the Organisation INTAS of the European Union and the British Library. In 1998 Tjeerd de Graaf has for his efforts been rewarded  by the Doctorate Honoris Causa of the University of St. Petersburg.

The Voices from Tundra and Taiga

Projects in the framework of this research program have been carried out in order to the support  endangered languages in the Russian Federation. The NWO project with the same title "Voices from Tundra and Taiga" has been successfully concluded in 2005 (see Final Report ). In most of the projects use is made of the sound recordings in the archives of the Russian Museum of Literature (Pushkinsky Dom) in St.Petersburg.

Endangered Archives

Since 1 September 2006 we started a new project on Endangered Archives, which is financially supported by the Programme on Endangered Archives of the British Library. See for more details the project description.

Former projects

Former joint projects with St. Petersburg include restoration of old sound archives on German dialects,  the study of Yiddish in St. Petersburg, and the support and linguistic description of small languages of the Russian North and the St. Petersburg area.