MOSCOW, March 28 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul) - On April 17, the Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow will hold a trial on the merits of an honor and dignity protection lawsuit filed by the Chukchi people against the authors of the 1998 Big Russian Definition Dictionary, RAPSI reports from the courtroom.

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 Olga Yetylina, Head of the Community of Indigenous People of the North, Siberia and the Far East.

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.

The court hearing on Friday was only attended by a representative of Readers Digest. He believes their dictionary was included in the case by mistake as it does not contain the definition in question. The court postponed the hearing and instructed the plaintiffs to limit the defendants and to consider filing the lawsuit with a St. Petersburg court.

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.