Yamal Nenets Film Series. Event-film as ethnographic research practice and a virtual field
This article analyzes the Yamal Nenets Film Series (2024–2025), a nine-hour sequence of observational event-films edited from video footage recorded among Nenets reindeer herders on the Yamal Peninsula in 1999. In a context where pandemics and Russia’s war in Ukraine have rendered classical long-term fieldwork in Yamal politically and ethically untenable, the article asks how such historical audiovisual material can function simultaneously as an ethnographic source, a representational form, and a method of “returning” to a now-inaccessible field.
The article conceptualizes filming as a mode of embodied participant observation, in which handheld camera work, long takes, and synchronous sound attend to movement, gesture, and the sensory textures of tundra life. It then examines the re-editing of the footage into event-centred films that preserve the internal rhythm of everyday activities, alongside the technical and ethical implications of digital restoration. A third focus is remote post-production and translation under authoritarian conditions, where collaboration with Nenets partners must balance co-authorship with their protection from surveillance and political risk.
Situating the project within debates on observational cinema, archival ethnography, and “anthropology from home”, the article argues that the film series constitutes an open, processual archive rather than a closed documentary record. The archive remains receptive to new informational layers – such as Indigenous commentaries, researchers’ field notes, expert contextualization, and future reinterpretations – which accumulate over time and transform the meaning of the footage. As such, the series enables a form of virtual participant observation and pedagogical fieldwork simulation, while foregrounding the ethical demands of reflexive and security-aware collaboration with Indigenous research partners.
kabajantsik and vorlontsik
Vocabulary researchers have repeatedly discussed the origins of the Estonian words kabajantsik ‘vagabond, crook, suspicious person’ and vorlontsik ‘idler, loafer’, yet no convincing etymological explanation has emerged. This brief article explores, based on a wealth of background material, the possibility that these words originate from Russian.
For kabajantsik, the likely Russian loan source, in the author’s view, is the Pskov dialect word каба́щик (каба́ччик), cf. кабатчик meaning ‘innkeeper, tavern keeper’. The Votic word kabatšikk(a) ‘innkeeper’ also derives from the same source. vorlontsik is probably borrowed from a word family that includes the Russian dialect forms (from Pskov and Northwest Russia) ворлыха́н ‘thievish person, crook’, ворлы́га ‘thief’, and варлы́га ‘lazy person, loafer; a person with a changeable mind’.
Heinrich Göseken in Stockholm
The Lutheran priest Heinrich Göseken, a well-known figure in Estonian linguistic and cultural history, lived and worked briefly in Stockholm during the mid-1630s. This period of his life has received little attention in scholarly literature, even though it led to Göseken, originally from Hanover, becoming engaged to Dorothea Siegel, the daughter of a Tallinn merchant and widow of the prematurely deceased Johannes Weidling, a former professor of Oriental languages at the University of Tartu. After relocating to Estonia and marrying Dorothea Siegel, Göseken began his distinguished career as a clergyman, language enthusiast, translator, and occasional poet. Before his time in Stockholm, Göseken studied at the Lippstadt Gymnasium, which he probably graduated in 1632 – a year later than previously thought – and continued his studies at the University of Rostock in 1633. Göseken arrived in Stockholm as a private tutor for the children of Johannes Rotlöben, also assisting Rotlöben in preaching in the German St. Gertrude Parish Church. In addition to being the pastor of the German congregation in Stockholm, Rotlöben served as the court preacher for the dowager queen. This article gives an account of the circumstances of the German congregation at the time in question, discusses Göseken’s living conditions in the Swedish capital, and attempts to investigate where he resided. Finally, it briefly discusses Göseken’s involvement in Queen Christina’s coronation in the autumn of 1650, where he and Bishop Joachim Jhering represented the Estonian Consistory. The representatives of Sweden’s Baltic Sea provinces used the occasion to present a petition to the queen, outlining proposals to improve the ecclesiastical and social conditions of the provinces.
This article critically examines Andres Dido’s poem Sõjalaul (“War Song”) within its historical and literary context. Andres Dido (1855–1921) was an Estonian writer and journalist who participated in the radical wing of the 19th century Estonian national movement. He was arrested in 1882 for alleged anti-government actions, imprisoned for three years, and later lived in exile in Geneva and Paris. Dido’s poem Sõjalaul, confiscated during a house search in 1882, was an incendiary text calling for revenge against the Baltic Germans for past injustices and advocating for some form of Estonian self-determination.
Although literary critics have described the poem as derivative and artistically weak, its political implications have drawn significant interest. In particular, Dido’s use of the terms Eesti riik (Estonian state) and Eesti vabatriik (Estonian free state) has in later reception been interpreted as an early reference to Estonian independence. Through an examination of Dido’s original manuscript and its contemporary German translation (transcriptions of both are provided), this article traces the poem’s reception over time. While it has been retrospectively framed as a prophecy of Estonian independence, its original intent was less clear. The poem’s radicalism made it useful as evidence in Dido’s trial, but the idea that he advocated for Estonian separatism (rather than autonomy) was likely a construct of Baltic German authorities seeking to discredit him and other Estonian nationalists.
On the origin of the Estonian name Petseri
There are several explanations for the origin of the name of the town of Petseri (Russian: Печоры) and its monastery (commonly referred to as Печерский монастырь). The author of this article is convinced that the name Petseri derives from the Old East Slavic word печера, meaning ‘cave’. The formation of the toponym is inspired by the sandstone cave, which is closely tied to the history of the Petseri monastery. There is no reason to associate the name with that of the village of Paatskohka, as that is based on a personal name. According to current information, Petseri first appears in the Estonian written word on a map of the Baltic Sea provinces compiled by Ernst Wilhelm Woldemar Schultz in 1859.
Karima Kadaoui, Hanin Atwany, Hamdan Al-Ali
et al.
We introduce JEEM, a benchmark designed to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on visual understanding across four Arabic-speaking countries: Jordan, The Emirates, Egypt, and Morocco. JEEM includes the tasks of image captioning and visual question answering, and features culturally rich and regionally diverse content. This dataset aims to assess the ability of VLMs to generalize across dialects and accurately interpret cultural elements in visual contexts. In an evaluation of five prominent open-source Arabic VLMs and GPT-4V, we find that the Arabic VLMs consistently underperform, struggling with both visual understanding and dialect-specific generation. While GPT-4V ranks best in this comparison, the model's linguistic competence varies across dialects, and its visual understanding capabilities lag behind. This underscores the need for more inclusive models and the value of culturally-diverse evaluation paradigms.
The diversity of human language, shaped by social, cultural, and regional influences, presents significant challenges for natural language processing (NLP) systems. Existing benchmarks often overlook intra-language variations, leaving speakers of non-standard dialects underserved. To address this gap, we introduce EnDive (English Diversity), a benchmark that evaluates five widely-used large language models (LLMs) across tasks in language understanding, algorithmic reasoning, mathematics, and logic. Our framework translates Standard American English datasets into five underrepresented dialects using few-shot prompting with verified examples from native speakers, and compare these translations against rule-based methods via fluency assessments, preference tests, and semantic similarity metrics. Human evaluations confirm high translation quality, with average scores of at least 6.02/7 for faithfulness, fluency, and formality. By filtering out near-identical translations, we create a challenging dataset that reveals significant performance disparities - models consistently underperform on dialectal inputs compared to Standard American English. EnDive thus advances dialect-aware NLP by uncovering model biases and promoting more equitable language technologies.
Tawsif Tashwar Dipto, Azmol Hossain, Rubayet Sabbir Faruque
et al.
Conventional research on speech recognition modeling relies on the canonical form for most low-resource languages while automatic speech recognition (ASR) for regional dialects is treated as a fine-tuning task. To investigate the effects of dialectal variations on ASR we develop a 78-hour annotated Bengali Speech-to-Text (STT) corpus named Ben-10. Investigation from linguistic and data-driven perspectives shows that speech foundation models struggle heavily in regional dialect ASR, both in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We observe that all deep learning methods struggle to model speech data under dialectal variations but dialect specific model training alleviates the issue. Our dataset also serves as a out of-distribution (OOD) resource for ASR modeling under constrained resources in ASR algorithms. The dataset and code developed for this project are publicly available
Malik H. Altakrori, Nizar Habash, Abed Alhakim Freihat
et al.
We present DialectalArabicMMLU, a new benchmark for evaluating the performance of large language models (LLMs) across Arabic dialects. While recently developed Arabic and multilingual benchmarks have advanced LLM evaluation for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), dialectal varieties remain underrepresented despite their prevalence in everyday communication. DialectalArabicMMLU extends the MMLU-Redux framework through manual translation and adaptation of 3K multiple-choice question-answer pairs into five major dialects (Syrian, Egyptian, Emirati, Saudi, and Moroccan), yielding a total of 15K QA pairs across 32 academic and professional domains (22K QA pairs when also including English and MSA). The benchmark enables systematic assessment of LLM reasoning and comprehension beyond MSA, supporting both task-based and linguistic analysis. We evaluate 19 open-weight Arabic and multilingual LLMs (1B-13B parameters) and report substantial performance variation across dialects, revealing persistent gaps in dialectal generalization. DialectalArabicMMLU provides the first unified, human-curated resource for measuring dialectal understanding in Arabic, thus promoting more inclusive evaluation and future model development.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) performance for low-resource languages is still far behind that of higher-resource languages such as English, due to a lack of sufficient labeled data. State-of-the-art methods deploy self-supervised transfer learning where a model pre-trained on large amounts of data is fine-tuned using little labeled data in a target low-resource language. In this paper, we present and examine a method for fine-tuning an SSL-based model in order to improve the performance for Frisian and its regional dialects (Clay Frisian, Wood Frisian, and South Frisian). We show that Frisian ASR performance can be improved by using multilingual (Frisian, Dutch, English and German) fine-tuning data and an auxiliary language identification task. In addition, our findings show that performance on dialectal speech suffers substantially, and, importantly, that this effect is moderated by the elicitation approach used to collect the dialectal data. Our findings also particularly suggest that relying solely on standard language data for ASR evaluation may underestimate real-world performance, particularly in languages with substantial dialectal variation.
When the body speaks. Margit Lõhmus’ Sterne as a challenge to the norm
Margit Lõhmus’ book Sterne has received attention for its portrayal of the female body and sexuality, which are presented in a hyperbolic and sometimes caricatured way, departing from conventional norms. This allows the book to be placed within the context of queer literature, understood here as literature that challenges norms. In Sterne, gender identity often does not conform to the expectations of heteronormativity, and gender is not simply divided into male and female. Queerness is also evident in the unexpected sources of pleasure, the characters’ appearances, and the depiction of bodies and relationships.
Lõhmus intentionally employs obscene language, focusing on women’s bodily experiences and perspectives on the body and sexuality. Sexual encounters are frequently described as empty or disturbing, while a sense of wholeness is found in solitude. Sex with men is often depicted as alienating. In Sterne, the body is presented outside traditional heteronormative frameworks, with sexual pleasure and arousal occurring in non-sexual situations. Humour plays a significant role, especially through surprising metaphors and self-irony.
The book’s transgressive nature is also reflected in its form, as Sterne employs colloquial language to ensure the authenticity of the characters and convey their personal worldview. In some stories, Lõhmus’ style mimics online communication, omitting punctuation and using lowercase letters to emphasize linguistic freedom and the contrast between imagination and reality. The book shifts between seriousness, irony, and grotesque scenes, challenging traditional gender roles and literary conventions. Through this, Lõhmus introduces into Estonian literature a queer work where gender is non-binary, and sexuality is freed from heteronormative constraints.
The article stems from Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of being in a situation, applied to examine two theatrical situations: the premiere of Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy “Salomé” in France, and the stage productions of the play in Estonia before and after World War II. The article demonstrates, in line with other studies, that in the French context, decadence mainly arises from the reluctance of bourgeois intellectuals to acknowledge their class membership and a yearning for the lifestyle of the aristocracy of the intellect, whereas in Estonia, (French) decadence is harnessed for cultural development and lofty aesthetic goals. It is noteworthy that “Salomé” is introduced to Estonian audiences during the building phases of the nation and hence also culture, both in 1919 and 1989. Due to spatial and temporal distance, the play’s sensuality wanes, and eroticism transforms into an exoticism of sorts. The directors find it challenging, and mostly do not aim, to apply the style and techniques characteristic of symbolism in the broader context of a realistic and psychological theatrical tradition. In conclusion, decadence, with its openness to the Other and inherent opposition to utilitarianism and progress, is inherently positive, and its retreat signals society’s stagnation and a pervasive bitterness.
The article explores the free-verse poetics of Artur Alliksaar (1923–1966), Estonia’s foremost poet of language. Alliksaar faced poverty and repression under the Soviet regime, making it challenging to publish his work. A small selection of his poems were published as a book only posthumously. Nonetheless, Alliksaar’s influence on the poetry revival of the 1960s and the emerging generation of poets was profound. Estonian poetry and the language itself have been forever altered by his volcanic inspiration. In the late 1950s, Estonia witnessed a fierce debate over free verse: while the official stance favoured conservative metrical forms, the younger generation championed formal and substantive freedom. Alliksaar initially wrote in elegant metrical forms like sonnets and rhymed quatrains, but by 1960, he too embraced free verse. The article suggests that he drew inspiration from Walt Whitman’s prose-like long lines, which he meticulously instrumented and enriched with figurative devices, resulting in an unprecedented, baroque orchestration. Alliksaar held deep reverence for the poetics of Estonian runic verse and consistently employed alliteration and open parallelism in his compelling associative compositions. His impressive arsenal includes all manners of figurative devices drawn from folklore and baroque rhetoric: sound devices, tropes, and figures – often used hyperbolically and comically. Unprecedented in Estonian poetry is the flood of linguistic wizardry: diverse repetitions, extended metaphors and metalepses, catachrestic contrasts and systematic antitheses, paradoxical puns, echoes and chiasms, refined vocabulary and ad hoc neologisms, rhetorical syntax, and graphic articulation. It could be argued that Alliksaar’s volcanic alliterative innovation finds its archetype in the free-verse-like primal structure of proto-accentual chants and lamentations that preceded quantitative runic verse.
This article explores the profoundly affective and ambivalent aesthetics of decadence. The analysis focuses on two examples from the early prose of A. H. Tammsaare (1878–1940) and Johannes Semper (1892–1970): “The Fly” (Kärbes, 1917) and “Sacred Weed” (Püha umbrohi, 1918). These works are viewed within the broader context of the authors’ entire body of work. The decadent aesthetics of Tammsaare’s and Semper’s works derive from Nietzschean and Bergsonian notions of decadence and life. The article illustrates the contrasts and similarities between these two notions, with the latter elucidated by reference to movement, change, and transition. Critics have also suggested connections between Nietzschean concepts, such as life and the Dionysian, and Bergson’s élan vital and duration. Scholars have similarly highlighted the association of decadence with change. Moreover, decadence and life as movement and change partly resonate with Baudelaire’s portrayal of modernity as fleeting, ephemeral and incidental, which is rooted in the experience of the urban environment. Through these interpretations, the analyzed texts clearly respond to accelerated modernization. The article emphasizes that the Nietzschean-Bergsonian framework is considerably broader than Baudelairean definitions of modernity inspired by the urban environment. At the core of “The Fly” and “Sacred Weed” are practices that enhance one’s perception of reality, building on concepts, images, and ideas related to Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s decadence and life. Both authors are concerned with the confluence of crises, the representations of which become dynamic through textual strategies associated with decline and decay, as well as their overcoming. The article concludes with a realization that the rich intertextuality steeped in a heightened perception of movement and flow, inspired not only by Nietzsche, Bergson, and Baudelaire but also by several other key influencers of decadent aesthetics, renders Tammsaare’s and Semper’s works innovative and demanding for the reader.
"Factual narrative in the 17th century: On the narrative structure
of the minutes of the Estonian corporation of nobility". To date, there has been hardly any scholarly consideration of minutes (Protokoll) and reports (Bericht) as narrative texts with poetic potential, especially in 17th-century literature. In preparation for an edition of the minutes, this article is dedicated to an initial analysis of the minutes written by Caspar Meyer, secretary of the corporation of Estonian nobility (Estländische Ritterschaft) from 1634 to 1653. The analysis comprises several aspects: a preliminary look at definitions is followed by a discussion of the emergence of minutes as a combination of different text forms (e.g., records of meetings, travel reports, court verdicts, letters) in the presumably immediate draft transcript and the subsequent carefully crafted fair copy. It then outlines the narrative means and structures used to construct the lifeworld of the corporation of Estonian nobility in the protocol as a factual narrative. Particular attention is paid to the author of the protocol and his representation in the narrative. The strict requirements of brevity, neutrality, and reliability in representing reality severely limited the author’s options, but allow an illuminating insight into the means of constructing self-narratives, as the author is also a protagonist in the Baltic lifeworld (baltische Lebenswelt) of his time.
Baltic German humour and anecdotes about clergymen
Baltic German anecdotes (Pratchen) are a relatively unexplored part of Estonian folk humour, much like Baltic German culture within Estonian culture as a whole. This study focuses on anecdotes about Lutheran clergymen, which offer material for comparison with the more thoroughly researched Estonian counterparts. These humorous tales provide valuable insights into the cultural history, mentality, language as well as everyday life of the Baltic German community.
Older Estonian anecdotes about clergymen often emphasize the social and ethnic differences between Estonian peasants and the clergy. In contrast, Baltic German anecdotes provide an internal perspective, exploring the role of the clergy within the Baltic German community and their outreach beyond it. The anecdotes can offer explanations for certain aspects that remain obscure and are therefore ridiculed in Estonian anecdotes. Two key features of Baltic German humour are its oral nature and the tradition of competing in witticisms (pliggern), a “national sport” possibly rooted in student culture.
Initially shared orally, these anecdotes often referenced known people and places. They were later written down to preserve the memory and cultural history of the community. Older anecdotes published between the world wars, became classics that kept appearing in various forms in later collections. World War II added a final layer, with humour providing a way to encapsulate and process epochal events.
In Baltic German anecdotes, clergymen are depicted in everyday activities and relationships, often taking on the role of the trickster parson. Unlike in Estonian jokes, the dynamic between the nobility and the church features prominently. This often takes the form of a humorous tug of war between the clergyman and the noble patron of the church, who may have attended school together in the past. The parson’s attitude towards parishioners is usually benevolent but patronizing, with the parish clerk, sexton, and coachman often playing supporting roles. Another central theme is the clergyman as a political figurehead, reflecting the tensions caused by the official campaigns of Russification and conversion to Russian Orthodoxy.
This article explores how the works and activities of close intellectual companions Johannes Barbarus and Johannes Semper reconcile their alignment with a decadent and aestheticist artistic stance with their leftist views (leading to collaboration with Soviet power and the writing of propagandistic poetry). The discussion begins with Barbarus’ poem “Journey” (Teekond), where the individualistic poet contrasts with the “modern apes”, representing progressivist and calculating bourgeois modernity. The article delves into the internal ambivalence expressed in Barbarus’ poetry, revealing simultaneous attraction and repulsion towards large revolutionary crowds; the poet likely perceives the masses primarily as a source of aesthetic sublimity akin to other natural elements. The use of Verhaeren’s name in this poem and elsewhere in the works of Barbarus and Semper is then examined. The second half of the article broadens the discussion, exploring the shared grounds of decadence/aestheticism and utopian avant-gardism – an aesthetic resistance to modern progressivist society that ultimately leads to ideological transformation through the actualization of utopia and the internal collapse of initial aspirations. Barbarus and Semper’s mid-century choices can also be seen as artists’ aesthetic decisions, the fulfilment (but also failure) of aesthetic aspirations originating from decadence. The article concludes with the suggestion that aestheticism rooted in the attitudes of decadence may still be a viable approach to overcome the miseries of modernity – not by merging into revolutionary utopianism, but by assuming the form of “dark ecology”.
This article delves into the modernist/avant-garde subject that emerges in Jaan Oks’ poetic prose, utilizing psychoanalytic theories. It aims to elucidate how the libidinal-impulsive dynamics of the psyche manifest within the context of the poetic revolution seen in the texts under scrutiny, expanding the concept of the subject beyond fixed identities and the conventional portrayal of selfhood as something stable and permanent. Key concepts include Julia Kristeva’s subject in process and the Freudian oceanic feeling: these concepts are employed to describe various movements of this elusive modernist subject as, for example, atomization, flowing, and disintegration, thereby framing different phases in the avant-garde rejection of illusory wholeness to unveil the fundamental fragmentation of the psyche. In doing so, the article also explores the emergence of a complex sexual paradigm in Oks’ poetics and its potential transgressive semantic associations with the possibilities inherent in the subject’s gender identity.