The Kumandins are an indigenous people in Siberia with a number of about 3,000 persons living mainly in the Republic of Altai. They used to speak an Altaj Turkic language related to Uyghur. The Kumandin language is threatened with extinction as it is only used by 33% of the Kumandins as colloquial language.
VLACH intends to publish parts of the ethnolinguistic material which has been collected by Thede Kahl and Ioana Aminian from the Bijsk, Gorno Altajsk and Teletskoye regions. The field research was supported by the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and the DAAD in 2013 and was carried out with the local assistance of Aleksander Bespalov and Ljubov Nikolaevna Vishnickaja. Since 2017 VLACH takes care of the collection and works in cooperation with Alla Nabutova on its annotation and publication.
Until 2021 the photos and video clips on Kumandin will be published within the VLACH Kumandin collection.