Ob-Ugric Peoples

Ob-Ugric peoples, that is, the Khanty and Mansi, are the closest language relatives of Hungarians. In fact, this close language relation is pretty remote, as our ancestors separated thousands of years ago, and have ended up thousands of kilometers from each other. Only within the context of the Finno-Ugric language family does this qualify as a close relation, because it has been even longer since the ancestors of Hungarians separated from the ancestors of the speakers of the rest of the related languages. The Khanty and the Mansi were given the collective Ob-Ugric denomination because they live in North-Western Siberia, by the side of the river Ob and its tributaries.

The Khanty ethnonym is related etymologically to the Hungarian word had, the original meaning of which was ‘big family, lineage, clan’. The Mansi ethnonym, which has the same origin as magy-, the root of the Hungarian people’s name magyar, also originates from the name of a common, ancient clan.

The so-called external name of the Khanty is Ostyak, that of the Mansi is Vogul. These names were used in tsarist Russia. From there they spread to the world’s languages, and were also used in international scientific literature. In the Soviet Union, they switched to the internal names (Khanti, Mansi) from the 1930s. The switch gradually affected foreign literature, including Hungarian. The use of external names remained until the early 2000s, so we find the Ostyak and Vogul peoples’ names in Éva Schmidt’s Hungarian language publications as well.

The Khanty and Mansi are scattered on a vast area, live in small groups, and speak significantly distinct dialects, which are grouped by the cardinal directions. The three major Khanty dialect groups, the North, the East and the South meet where the Irtyš enters the Ob. The southern dialects were spoken south of this, on the banks of the Irtyš and its tributaries (Konda, Demjanka). Probably by the middle of the 20th century, the Southern Khanty have changed their language: they have assimilated into the neighboring Russian and Tartar groups.

The northern dialects are spoken north of the meeting of the flows of the Ob and the Irtyš, up until the mouth of the Ob. Among these, the southernmost (Šerkaly or Mid-Ob, Nizjam) have vanished by now, only 20th century collections preserve their traces. To the north of this, there are three viable dialect groups: the Kazym dialect spoken along the Kazym river, the Berjozov, or sometimes called Šuryškary dialect (spoken by the people of Muži, Šuryškary, Tegi settlements, and the Synja and Kunovat rivers), and the Obdorsk dialect. Variations of this dialect are spoken around the Ob mouth, and in the valleys of the tributaries, the Sob and the Poluj. Éva Schmidt’s research area was the region of the northern dialects. She had the opportunity to meet the last speakers of the Šerkaly and the Nizjam dialects, and further north she could experience first hand that in neighboring villages slightly different variants were spoken.

We distinguish three groups of the eastern dialects spoken by the Middle Ob and its tributaries: the Salym, the Surgut and the Vakh-Vasjugan. Among these, the Salim group has only a small number of speakers. Speakers of the Surgut dialect live along the following tributaries: the L’amin, the Pim, the Tromagan, the Agan, and the Little and Great Jugans. The easternmost dialects are spoken along the Vakh and the Vasjugan, and along the Ob in the area of Aleksandrovo.

The northern and southern dialect groups show a number of similarities, so these two are also referred to collectively as the western dialect group. The most obvious acoustic feature that differentiates the two larger sets is that while the ancient *k consonant has preserved its occlusive character before a back vowel in the east, it became a fricative in the west. A good example for this is the Khanty people’s endonym: in the east it is qăntəγ, while in Salym, representing a transition between the southern and the eastern dialects, it is qăntə, in the south and in the southern-northern transitional Šerkaly it is χăntə, and in the north it is χănti.

The Mansi live in the area between the Ob and the Ural Mountains. Today, along the Ob, in the regions of the rivers Sosva, Sygva, and Upper Lozva only the northern dialect is spoken. To the south of this, the western dialect used to be spoken along the Lozva and Pelymka rivers, and the eastern one along the Konda. The southern dialect spoken along the Tavda was the earliest to become extinct.

The home of the Ob-Ugric peoples, the vast West Siberian Plain spans from the tundra up north by the Arctic Ocean through the forested tundra, which turns into a continuous swamp in the summer, to the taiga region. The settlements were built along the rivers rich in fish, and the forests are suitable for hunting. Two forms of reindeer keeping have evolved. In the north, tundra reindeer keeping in large herds has become general, requiring nearly constant migration with herds of several thousand reindeer. Families living in the forested tundra area have smaller numbers of reindeer, and move about with them seasonally on a smaller area. Horses are also kept on the banks of the Ob river. The Ob-Ugric families with whom Éva Schmidt first made contact happened to be horse keepers.

The traditional world view of the Ob-Ugric peoples is tripartite: in the middle world live the people, animals and plants, the upper world is the dwelling of the gods, and the lower is the place of the malevolent spirits and the deceased. Spirits and deities of different kinds and ranks are also present in the middle world: they take care of the rivers, secure fishing and hunting luck, the health and prosperity of the families. People make efforts to maintain good relations with them, offering different sacrificial gifts from time to time. Connection between the living and the dead, and between people and the spirit world can be created by the shamans.

Amidst the harsh northern weather conditions, the Ob-Ugric peoples managed to create a lifestyle in which people and nature live in harmony. Their existence is seriously threatened by oil and natural gas extraction, which began in the 1960s, and the environmental destruction that it entailed. Today, only a smaller portion of Ob-Ugric peoples pursue traditional farming, the majority have moved into the villages and cities. However, culture and religion, in a somewhat altered form, are still alive in the bigger settlements.

The study of Ob-Ugric languages and cultures began in the middle of the 19th century. It was pioneered by , who collected a vast amount of linguistic and folklore material among both peoples between 1843 and 1845 (Reguly homepage). Antal Reguly’s Mansi language collections were decoded by on the site in 1888, and he himself also added to the Mansi material. Reguly’s Khanty materials were deciphered by , who travelled the Northern Khanty language area in 1898. Both of them had ethnographers as travel mates: Bernát Munkácsi collaborated with , and József Pápay was in the Ob region at the same time as . Only a hundred years later, through the work of Éva Schmidt did the Reguly-Munkácsi-Pápay collections return to where they originated from, the Ob-Ugrians.

Among the Finns, was the first to collect linguistic material in the southern and eastern Khanty territories (1845), followed by in the northern Khanty dialect area (1858, 1877). The Finno-Ugric Society in Finland was founded in 1883. From that time on, it funded fieldwork by Finnish researchers among the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia. It was under the aegis of this that collected for four years, between 1898 and 1902 on the entire Khanty language area, as did among the Mansi between 1901 and 1906. conducted ethnographic research in the Ob region in 1898 and 1899. spent a longer period among the Khanty with a scholarship from the University of Helsinki in 1900–1901. The collections of both the Hungarian and the Finnish researchers were published after their death. Legacy publishing provided several generations with work as well as an opportunity to be immersed in the theme.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the researcher from Russia to be mentioned is , who collected and published Southern Khanty folklore.

In the Soviet era, Western Siberia was a restricted area. If foreign researchers wanted to meet Ob-Ugric peoples, they could only do that in Leningrad, at the Institute of the Peoples of the North. This was how and collected Mansi linguistic material in the 1950s. and had the opportunity to learn about Khanty dialects in the 1960s, and in the 1970s. There were only two exceptions at this time, for whom the possibility of travel was opened up: and Éva Schmidt. The German Steinitz was actually living in the Soviet Union as an immigrant between 1934 and 1937. As a professor of the Institute of the Peoples of the North, he collected a substantial amount of material from students studying there, and in the summer of 1935, he could go to Western Siberia himself. Éva Schmidt was a scholarship student when she earned the right to travel to the land of the Khanty in 1970 and 1971. By that time, she had absorbed all the knowledge that had been collected by her predecessors over a century and a half.

The cooperation of researchers and informants had mutual benefits. During the collection of data, talented college students’ attitudes to their mother tongue also changed. Grammatical regularities were revealed to them, and they became committed to the cultivation of their language and culture. They later became the most successful linguists and intellectuals. Steinitz’s most talented student was , while became the best expert of the Mansi language through her cooperation with György Lakó and Béla Kálmán. Károly Rédei’s informants, and are still leading figures of Khanty cultural life today, and the Surgut Khanty textbook author also reminisces gratefully about her joint work with László Honti and Julianna Rusvai. Finally, wherever one goes all over the Ob region, traces of Éva Schmidt’s activity will be found everywhere.