MOSCOW, May 26 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul) - Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Chukchi people against the authors of the Big Russian Dictionary published in 1998, Olga Yetylina, Head of the Community of Indigenous People of the North, Siberia and the Far East told RAPSI.

The plaintiffs will appeal the court ruling, she said.

Three plaintiffs, including merited artist Alexander Tevlyalkot, addressed the court regarding the dictionary's definition of the Chukchi people as a “naive and narrow-minded people,” explained Yetylina earlier.

The defendants in the case are linguist Sergei Kuznetsov, publishers Norint, Readers Digest Publishing House, Ripol Media and the Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The plaintiffs are suing on the grounds that the definition discredits the honor and dignity of the Chukchi people. The suit also demands that Kuznetsov's dictionary be removed from libraries and that the court ruling be posted online. The claimants' demands include moral damages in the amount of 5 million rubles ($140,525) from each of the defendants.

Chukchi is a small ethnicity in the Russian Federation, the indigenous people of the Chukotka Autonomous Area, a constituent entity in the Far East. There are 15,908 Chukchi according to the 2010 Census.