It was a pleasure to us to work on this project, we sincerely thank everyone who helped us, and look forward to seeing this in print.
Mira Bergelson and Andrej Kibrik
1997
In 1847 Gregorii Kvasnikoff, a Russian Orthodox Church missionary, brought his wife Mavra of Kodiak Island, half Alutiiq and half Russian, and their large family, to Ninilchik. They settled into the valley at the mouth of Ninilchik River and stayed. Not long after Kvasnikoffs arrived, Oskolkoff sons came with their mother and stepfather. Oskolkoff sons married Kvasnikoff daughters and all the old families of Ninilchik descend from these unions.
The Kvasnikoffs and Oskolkoffs brought the Russian language to Ninilchik. Russian continued to be spoken in the village long after Alaska was purchased by the U.S. from the Russians in 1867. There was a Russian school in the village which taught basic Russian literacy to the children and schooled them some in the Old Church Slavonic language used in the Russian Orthodox Church services in the village church.
The late Kenai elder, Peter Kalifornsky, who spoke Dena'ina, an Athabaskan language spoken on the northern Kenai Peninsula, Tyonek, and a little farther north, believed that the name "Ninilchik" is originally from the Dena'ina word "Niqnilchint.". Peter was not certain of the meaning of this Indian name, but thought it meant something like "Lodge By the River." It is likely that Peter's ancestors used to camp and fish along what is now called Ninilchik River. Peter's people were of the Athabaskan Indian group, not of the Alutiiq ("Aleut") people from the Kodiak and southern Kenai Peninsula area, from whom we of the village of Ninilchik receive our Native blood.
Prejudice against Alaskan Natives (or Russian-Native "creoles" of villages like Ninilchk), their languages and cultures, grew stronger and stronger in the first half of the 1900's. My father and his siblings did not attend a Russian school. Instead, they attended a new "American" school where they learned to speak English. For some, the adjustment to American culture and English was traumatic. Many young women left the village to integrate into life in one of the cities, such as Anchorage, Seward, or Seattle. They would marry "white" (American) men. Sometimes they would deny their Native background, including that they could speak Russian which was considered by the dominant American culture as a sign of being "backward."
In the mid 1900's more and more homesteaders moved to the Ninilchik area. They spoke only English. and this put additional pressure upon the Russian speakers. The balance of language usage between Russian and English shifted quickly to English. But many of the old families still spoke Russian to each other in private. And even when conversations came more and more to be carried on in English certain words which were important to Ninilchik life were still often said in Russian, even by young people who had not learned to speak the language.
I grew up in the 1950's hearing Russian spoken a great deal in Ninilchik. Villagers regularly spoke Russian to each other. My father spoke Russian to his mother and siblings. Some of my cousins spoke some Russian if they came from families where Russian was spoken in the home. I did not; my mother had come to Ninilchik from California. But I learned a number of Russian words and could understand some of what I heard of conversations.
Then, suddenly, in the mid 1950's, Russian stopped being spoken in public. My father stopped speaking Russian to his siblings and his mother (until shortly before she died in 1985).
Having grown up in a multi-lingual village, I had a natural curiosity about languages. In college I decided to become a linguist and have enjoyed studying other languages. But I have always felt a pull back to my Ninilchik roots. Before it is too late I want to try to preserve as much of our village language as possible. A number of my relatives know Ninilchik Russian far better than I do and so could do a better job making a dictionary of our language. But I like making dictionaries. I know how to use dictionary-making programs on the computer. And somebody needs to do this job before it is too late. As they say (in English, anyway!), fools rush in where angels fear to tread. I'm willing to be a little foolish so that we can save what we can of our language before it is too late. I very much welcome help from those better qualified than I am.
Bobbie Oskolkoff has a helpful word list on her Internet website which come from her own memories of Ninilchik Russian, those of her husband, Arnie, and results from the work of Andrej Kibrik and his wife, Mira Bergelson, linguists from Moscow who studied Ninilchik Russian in the summer of 1997. We are thankful that Andrej and Mira have shared their work with us so that it could be expanded and saved for future generations of Ninilchik people to study. In this way we can better understand the language part of our Ninilchik history.
Today there are not many Ninilchik elders left who can speak Russian fluently. Most have been speaking English for so long that their Russian has gotten rusty. I know of only one married couple who still speaks Russian to each other. We are trying to preserve as much of the old language of Ninilchik as we can while there are people left who know how to say the words.
Ninilchik people have sometimes used different letters for some of the sounds. And that is just fine. Here is how some letters in this dictionary line up with other ways of writing Ninilchik words. We have often written the word for 'wild celery' as poochka. In this dictionary the "oo" sound is written as "u", the long "u" sound as in the English word "rude." Sometimes we have written the word for fish or meat pie as "peerock." In this dictionary it is written as "pirak." The long "i" sound of English, as in the word "bite," is written in this dictionary as "ay", as in baydárka, an Alaskan Native canoe. Ninilchik Russian "a" is sometimes pronounced as in English "father" and sometimes close to English "u" as in the English word "gum." Ninilchik Russian "e" is sometimes pronounced as the "a" in English "bake" and sometimes like "e" in English "let."
The apostrophe (') after a consonant indicates that it is palatalized or "soft", as it is called in Russian. A soft consonant sounds similar to having a "y" after it. For instance, the Russian word meaning 'you' is written in this dictionary as "t'i", basically the same as if we wrote it as "tyi.'
The letter "x" in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet as well as the Americanized alphabet used in this dictionary is similar to the letter "h". In fact, sometimes Ninilchik people pronounce this letter the same as "h". However, when they pronounce the actual "x" sound, it is harsher, raspier than "h". Linguists call it a voiceless velar fricative. Children sometimes pretend to make the sound of a gun going off by saying something like "kxx". If we take off that "k" sound we are left with the Russian "x" sound. This sound can be heard the way some Ninilchik speakers say the word for 'rooster,' pitúx (others say it as pitúh), or the word for 'shirt', rubáxa.
The letters "zh" have the same sound as the letter "z" in the English word "azure."
If you compare Ninilchik Russian words written with English letters with their Cyrllic spellings, you will often see that the Ninilchik "a" letter corresponds to Cryllic "o." This is not unique to Ninilchik Russian. It is a regular sound rule of many dialects of Russian, including Moscow Russian. So the word for "dog" is written in this dictionary as "sabaka," which is how it is pronounced in Ninichik as well as in Moscow, even though the first vowel is written in Cryllic with the Russian letter "o." Similarly, the word for "thank you" is written with English letters as "spasiba," because that is how it is pronounced in Ninilchik and Moscow, even though the last letter is writen in Moscow with the Cyrillic letter "o."
Please let me know about any mistakes you find in this dictionary. And, of course, we would to add more words. Many other Russian dictionaries that have been published. But we have never had a dictionary, as far as I know, with the words that we spoke in Ninilchik.
This is a work in progress. It needs more revision. If you know of corrections and additions needed, you can email them to me at: wayne dot leman at gmail dot com (replace the "dot" and "at" words with the usual email symbols).
Spasiba, thank you
Wayne Leman
2009