MOSCOW, April 17 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul) - Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court  on May 26 will consider  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 Thursday.

The hearing was postponed because of the plaintiff’s absence.

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 earlier 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.

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.