#pomor

saami girl and pomor girl in national clothes

Моє послєднє творєніє, бо наступного разу я зможу повазюкати так через місяць

Ну взагалі не ідєально, але мені подобається

a work i made for a zine

Russenorsk was, by all means, something which could be described as a "langauge of trade." It was formed solely to make it possible, and easier, to communicate across trade; the Norwegians couldn't speak Russian and the Russian "Pomors" couldn't speak Norwegian. This topic however, is quite large in scope and one Tumblr post wouldn't near do it justice. For a better comprehensive view of the development of Russenorsk, I would point readers to Broch & Jahr (1988) for a Norwegian source and Kortlandt (2000) for an English source.

No this zooms in on one specific aspect of it: the contacts between the Norwegian hunters on Svalbard in the 18th and 19th and the Pomors who either came to trade, hunt or build ships. This specificity is based off of Minaeva & Karelin (2020), a paper which discusses the rise and decline of the Russenorsk language on Svalbard.

The first contact between people on Svalbard and Pomors would be in 1744. However, it would be another 30 ish years before any real cooporation was made between the two people; in the meanwhile, many contacts were made but they were mostly due to stops in bigger trips or shiprecks [p.117]. It wasn't until the 1780's that the Pomor people and Norwegians began working together and "marked the beginning of joint Russian-Norwegian crafts in the archipelago" [p.118]. And throughout the next 70 or so years, the Pomor-Svalbard trade or at least communications became well established and accidents and triumps litter the time period [p.118-120].

Now, to the actual point of this post, the language development was due to several different reasons. One being that the Russian-Norwegian trade had been going on for ages, since at least the 16th century; even during England's continetal blockade during the Napoleonic wars, was unable to stop the trade between the two nations. Second, the language, as mentioned above, was done to make trading between the two peoples much easier [p.121]. The language was fully developed through to the mid 19th century. A Russian explorer, poignant in his remark of the stark contrast with which the Pomors and Norwegians spoke with ease, whilst when he got to Norway that "'now i only feel my hopelessness" [p.122].

The Pomors learned the langauge, knowing they would be stranded on Svalbard for a bit after their expeditions or hunting seasons. They learned the langauge for trade, yet also to call out for emergency [p.123-124]. The Russenorsk language, in all of its beauty when one thinks about it poetically, was ultimately only a langauge of short-term use. Soon, when the trade stopped due to Bolshevik blockade of the Pomor trade and connections between the two peoples faded, the langauge did too [p.122]. The langauge, which once although shallow, connected two foreign peoples with one another, faded into irrelevancy (at least in Svalbard).

That's about it. Thank you a lot of reading this if you got to the end, this is very hapharzdly put together but its just to test the waters with how I use this blog. Anyways, see ya next time when I inevitably get the random urge to post something here. References: Minaeva, T.S. & Karelin, V.A. (2020). Language contacts between Pomors and Norwegians during expeditions to Svalbard in the second half of the 18th — first half of the 19th centuries.

Kortlandt, F. (2000). On Russenorsk.

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