A group of Moscow researchers have collected recordings of a unique Russian dialect spoken by a handful of elderly people in Alaska, isolated for more than a century from modern Russian.  There are 20 people, all over the age of 75, living in the Alaskan village of Ninilchik who speak the peculiar Russian dialect, according to the linguists. This community, descendants of Russian speakers who colonized Alaska in the 19thCentury, had relatively little contact with the other major group of Russian-speakers in the state – Orthodox Christian Old Believers who fled persecution in their homeland and gradually settled in Alaska in the 1960s.  Although Ninilchik is by the sea, its inhabitants also had little contact with passing Soviet sailors, the researchers said.  Read more …