Our fieldtrips
Fieldwork in North Ossetia
The first fieldtrip to the Republic of North Ossetia—Alania took place in winter 2007 with the following participants: Arseniy Vydrin (lead participant), Vitaly Volk, Nataliya Stoynova. Invaluable support in organizing this field trip was provided by Aslanbek Guriev. Most of the time in the field was spent in the village of Dargavs (Prigorodniy district). It was during this trip that most of the Iron oral texts presented here were recorded.
Since then, five more fieldtrips have been carried out. Their participants were Oleg Belyaev, David Erschler, Julia Mazurova, Vitaliy Volk and Arseniy Vydrin. In summer 2007 we worked in Dargavs, in winter 2008 — in Dargavs and in the Department of Ossetic philology of the North Ossetian State University, in the city of Vladikavkaz. In autumn 2008 and spring 2009 some of the participants (Arseniy Vydrin, Oleg Belyaev, Julia Mazurova) undertook a field trip to the area where Digor is spoken: the villages of Zadalessk, Nar, Macuta, Dzinaga, Galiat, Akhsau, Makhchesk, Vakac, and where the mixed Iron-Digor Wallagkom dialect is spoken: the villages of Kamunta and Dunta. During these fieldtrips the Digor oral texts presented here have been recorded and analysed.
In the classification proposed by D. R. Bekoev (Bekoev 1985), inhabitants of Dargavs speak on the Kurtati patois of the Iron dialect (orthographic 'с' is pronounced as [š], 'з' as [ž], 'ц' as [s], 'дз' as [z]).
In the areas where Digor is spoken which we have visited, the inhabitants speak the Stur-Digor patois of the Digor dialect. One of the peculiarities of this dialect is the pronounciation of the phonemes /dz/, /c/, /c'/, /z/ and /s/ as /dž/, /č/, /č'/, /ž/ and /š/ before front vowels, and it is reflected in our notes on transliteration here.
Fieldwork in South Ossetia
In the beginning of 2010 a field trip to South Ossetia was undertaken for the first time by Oleg Belyaev and Natalia Serdobolskaya. During this field trip the researchers have visited the city of Tskhinval and the village of Khetagurovo, where about 4 hours of oral texts in the Kudar dialect have been recorded.
