ИСТИНА

Nowadays obtaining informed consent from the speakers for recording, processing, archiving and disseminating data seems to be a self-evident practice during documentation activities and one of the preconditions for ethical linguistic research (Grinevald 2006; Dorian 2010; Robinson 2010; Eckert 2013; Bowern 2015). Recently, however, we realized that written consents that we had obtained in various field sites in Russia (Uilta, Tofa, Ket, Khamnigan and others) in fact have no legal force. According to the Russian Federal Law of 27 July 2006 N152-FZ on personal data, collecting, processing and disseminating biometrical data and any information on ethnical origin require a written consent with passport data included. Some new tendencies developing in language documentation relate directly to this law. Video recording, which belongs to biometrical data in terms of the law, has become a standard. Moreover, the idea of open data access gaining is currency, although it implies wider dissemination of the data. Ideally, the ethical workflow should comply with the law. Following the official procedure might lead to a total refusal from any kind of linguistic work on the part of the speakers. Since we are not ready to take initiatives to change this law, which does not take into acсount the reality of documentary work, we choose to continue our practice as it is and wait for future development of this situation. We might try to obtain passport data, but maybe not in the first year of our project. An alternative is to consider documentation work as a joint project so that legally it does not fall under the law on personal data. We will present the current results of our discussion with a lawyer and our preliminary decisions for the field season 2022. We hope for a fruitful exchange with participants from other countries on such legal issues. References: Bowern, Claire. 2015. Linguistic fieldwork: A practical guide. Second Edition Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dorian, Nancy C. 2010. Documentation and responsibility. Language & Communication. 30(3), 179-185. Eckert, Penelope. 2014. Ethics in linguistic research. In Robert J. Podesva & Devyani Sharma (eds) Research methods in linguistics. Cambridge University Press, 11-26. Grinevald, Collette. 2006. Worrying about ethics and wondering about “informed consent”: Fieldwork from an Americanist perspective. In Anju Saxena & Lars Borin (eds), Lesser-known languages of South Asia: Status and policies, case studies and application of information technology. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin/New York, 339-370. Robinson, Laura C. 2010. Informed consent among analog people in a digital world. Language & Communication 30(3), 186–191. Nicholas Thieberger, Simon Musgrave (2007). Documentary linguistics and ethical issues. In Peter K. Austin (ed.) Language Documentation and Description, vol 4. London: SOAS. 26-37.