Our research organization had an international conference with four Dungan scholars from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. This was so epoch-making in Japan that it caused the organization of the Japanese Circle of Dungan Studies and the publication of “Papers on Dungans”. The research organization visited above-mentioned two countries and invited Uzbek, Kazak and Korean linguists from Uzbekistan forinterchange of sociolinguistic information.

Russian dialects spoken by various peoples in Central Asia today have certain common characteristics indifferently to genealogical and typological property of their native languages, which suggests a history of pidginization and creolization undergone by the Russian language in this area. On the other hand, there will be no language except Russian which can serve as a common language for all the countries and peoples in Central Asia in the future either. If the Russian language education continues to be so poor both in quality and in quantity in spite of its necessity as it is today as a result of the economic difficulties of Central Asian countries, it may proceed to the "real" process of pidginization.

H. Kanno, the head investigator of this project and his assistant Munisa Baxronova performed fieldwork together chiefly in 2006 and 2007 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, invited an Uzbek specialist on sociolinguistics to Japan for collaboration and made an effort to get materials on mahallas, a minimal unit of region inhabited by peoples in Samarkand which was published in the results of this project. We could find following facts : (1) As is said, Uzbek is a Tadjikized Turkic language in the phonemes and vocabulary but accent seems not to be relevant in Tadjik differently from Uzbek, author's new attempt on accent of which was shown in the results of this project. Detail contrastive studies of grammatical categories between Uzbek and Tadjik are demanded. Author tried to describe the phenomenon : reduplications of "non-pon" type common to Uzbek, Tadjik and Russian in the results of this project. (2) Peoples who immigrated to Samarkand many centuries ago (Arabs, Iranians, Jews, Gypsy etc.) were already fully Uzbekized or Tadjikized but new immigrants (in 19th century) (Turkmenians) still reserve their own language. Immigrants from far regions (Russians, Armenians, Koreans etc.) were Russianized except Dungans who live collectively in kolkhozes and reserve their own language.

K.Yanagida, the head investigator of this project and H. Kanno, one of its registered members, performed fieldwork together in the summer of 2005 and 2006 in Bishkek, the capital city of Kirgiz, and at a village "Aleksandrovka" in its outskirts, most of the residents of which are Doungan people. In spite of unsatisfying results for his first purpose of the fieldwork in Bishkek this time, i.e. collecting enough sound materials of code-switching between Russian and Doungan languages to analyze this important phenomenon, Yanagida could get convinced of the existence of un-normative phenomena in the Russian language spoken by non-Slavic people of Cental Asia, which cover quite diverse nations speaking very different native languages. Thinking that this may be the vestige of a pidgin language with Russian lexicon which was formed through some complicated processes in the typical multilingual area of Central Asia, Yanagida considered in his article "On Doublets in Pidgins" the role of doublets in pidgin languages and their relation to the possibility of "replacement of lexicon", which apparently looks as if almost impossible, standing on the results of former studies about Russo-Norwegian pidgin and pidgins from Western languages. H.Kanno has collected all the available articles about Dunganese and all the available publications written in it in for two years and he also made a large collection of sound records of basic vocabulary of Dunganese through his fieldwork in Kirgiz. Having analyzed these materials, Kanno came to a conclusion that the phonological system of Dunganese is very similar to that of Mandarin Chinese despite the apparently large difference between them. So he also concluded that the present orthography of Dunganese with Cyrillic alphabet does not fully differentiate redundant features from distinctive ones and requires a certain amendment in the sense that it contains a larger number of letters than it needs. Kanno described details of his analysis and made his proposal for amendment of Dunganese orthography in his article "Dunganese and its Orthography". Kanno also edited a biographical catalogue which consists of 71 pages and contains the names of all the known Dungan persons with lists of their writings.

歴史に対する評価は往々にして現代社会のさまざまな思惑から、学術的客観性を逸脱して多方面への問題へと波及する可能性をはらんでいる。そうした傾向を排除して、この地域に共生をもたらす歴史認識の形成は如何にして可能となるのか。本研究課題はこうした課題への一定の解答を得るための具体的且つ詳細な資料・データをまとめ上げようとするものであった。とりわけ、高句麗史およ渤海史に関しては政治・言語・文化・教育といった現代的事象と深く繋がっており、この方面の分析・整理は不可欠である。 本年度は、一方ではまず問題となる地域において学術研究あるいは教育を担う機関がどのような認識を持っているか、さらにはどのような具体的方途を講じているかを、日本国内の各方面の専門家の協力をえつつ検証すべく延辺大学を訪れ、直接的に指揮する立場にある総長に面談し、一定の歴史認識の枠組みを構築しえた成果として、これを国家の政策(国益)に直結させようという動きを確認することができた。それはこれまで問題になってきた‘領土論'とはまた異質の、一定の経済的利得追究的な‘史跡および周辺自然の世界遺産化'を目指そうとするものであった。そうした動きの状況を歴史の現場から把握すべく、高句麗・渤海の史跡周辺を精査し、そうした地域の大きな変容相を確実に解明することができた。朝鮮民族文化方面の研究者たち(熊谷明泰・関西大学教授、佐野正人・東北大学助教授)の他、特に世界遺産問題では日本でのトップクラスの専門家である毛利和雄・NHM解説委員らの協力は大きかった。 さらに、これまで日本では20カ所ほどしか確認されていなかった北朝鮮内の渤海遺跡所在地を、文献精査によって60カ所以上の確認を行った。

In 2002, we conducted a field research about the ethnic culture of Koreans in Uzbekistan, who call themselves Koryo people. In Tashkent we met both youug and aged Koryo people ; the latter are members of the Senior Council of the Association of Korean Culture Centres. We held interviews with both groups regarding the cultural activities that help these different generations unite together. We discovered that the Korean language that is taught in Uzbekistan now is modern South Korean language. Koryo language, based on the dialect of Hamgyeong Province in Korea and handed over through the generations, is not taught. We stayed for a week at a former kolkhoz named Politodel in a suburb of Tashkent ; staying there, through numerous interviews, Yanagida and Kanno collected language samples of the second generation of Koryo people who were born around the year of 1937, in which their compulsive immigration was executed. From the result, we realized that their daily language is a kind of mixed language of Russian and Korean. After analyses in detail, we reached a conclusion that Koryo people's mother tongue is nothing but Korean and that their speech sways between Russian and Korean according to the speakers' attributes and/or the situation when they speak. The reasons of this conclusion is that even Koryo people who speak Russian as the only daily language often make mistakes which can be attributed to the structure of the Korean language on each of the phonological, morphological and syntactical levels. In this field research, Suzuki organized a statistical table that has information, such as the date of birth and decease and style of all the tombs in Politodel. Ueno took numerous photos of cultural livings of Koryo people and examined ethnic ego of the Koryo people with the information collected by Narisawa in South Korea.

This study aims to invetigate dynamic historical process of recent culture change which had taken place during recent 30 years among the native ethnic groups living in the border areas between China and Russian Far East. We took up the problem of culture change among such ethnic groups as Koreans living in Central Asia (formerly Soviet Union) and China, and Tungus Peoples, for example, Evenks, Oroch ens and Hezhes living in northern part of China. (1) We think it is very important for us to understand how the real drastic cultural, spiritual, and linguistic situations have been changed among above mentioned ethnic groups, especially since 1970th, when market and capitalist oriented economic system was introduced into these formerly socialist and collectivist societies. Moreover cross border exchange activities have influenced their lives. (2) Because huge amounts of Han Chinese population had settled in the nortern part of China, very drastic social change have occured in this region, so that Tungus people's ethnic spiritual and linguistic cultures have almost been lost in China, except few regions. (3) Ethnic Koreans in Central Asia and China although could have maintained their own Korean language, but recently adopted Chinese, Russian and South Korean words have increased, in order to adjust them -selves to its internal or international changing linguistic environments. (4) We also tried to compare the basic characters of folk literature materials collected in different hisorical periods, for example Hezhe epic published in 1930s and 1990s.