Russian mountains cradle hoard of ancient languages (fwd)

Mon Apr 23 15:06:24 UTC 2007

Russian mountains cradle hoard of ancient languages

Monday, April 23, 2007
Stephen Boykewich
KUBACHI - AFP
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=70553

  Life isn't bad in this North Caucasus mountain town. The air is pure, the
view is magnificent, and the centuries-old tradition of silver handiwork
guarantees jobs for all.

  There is one downside for the 2,000 residents of Kubachi, however. Their
neighbors a short donkey ride down the road can't understand a word they
say.

  "What we speak here, the Kubachinsky language, people in Darginsk don't
understand at all," said Magomed Akhmedov, 35, director of the village's
silverworks factory. "That's literally five or six kilometres away (three
to four miles)."

  The extraordinary linguistic diversity preserved amid these snow-capped
peaks is what led a 10th-century geographer to name the Caucasus "the
mountain of tongues."

  The rocky, mostly rural region of Dagestan has one of the highest
concentrations of languages in the world, between 30 and 70 in an area
smaller than Scotland.

  Its 2.3 million residents are divided into 34 ethnic groups and nearly all
speak Russian, as the territory fell to Russia's imperial advance in 1859.
Besides Russia are local languages that would strike fear into the heart of
any student who has ever wrestled with case endings.

  Lak, the native tongue of about five percent of the Dagestani population,
has 56 cases -- compared to six in Russian and a mere four in German --
language specialist Yunusov Abdul-Raman said.

  But even Lak is beaten by Tabasaran, which is spoken by 95,000 in southern
Dagestan and has 62 cases.

  "It was in the Guinness Book of World Records! These are extremely
difficult languages," Abdul-Raman said.

  Like many Dagestani tongues, Kubachinsky in not a written language and is
not taught in schools, but was preserved through the Soviet era by the same
combination of geography and tight social bonds that has preserved Kubachi's
tradition of silverworking for centuries.

  "We only marry among ourselves. There are exceptions, but you can count
them on the fingers of one hand," said Akhmedov, who has directed the
village's silverworks factory since 2001. "Everyone here is related in one
way or another."

  Unlike in neighboring Chechnya, which was devastated when Joseph Stalin
deported its entire population in 1944, Dagestan's mountain towns were
largely spared from Soviet social engineering.

  Aside from the total number of languages here -- which depends on where
lines are drawn between dialect and language -- the diversity of their
origins also amazes scholars.

  Aside from the native Caucasian languages, linguists have identified
Turkic, Mongol, Greek and other language families here.

  The Tats, an ethnic group of about 18,000 people living near the southern
coastal city of Derbent, still speak a dialect of Persian that is over
1,000 years old.

  But what seven decades of Soviet rule could not erode, the creep of
Western culture is beginning to.

  Children in Kubachi learn their native language only at home, since it has
no written form and is not taught in schools.

  The related language of Darginsky is, but has to jostle for position with
Russian and, increasingly, English.

  "To tell you the truth, we teach English better than our own language,"
said Darzhi Kurvan, the director of a village school.

  "As much as we talk about patriotism, beyond our region it's more
convenient and more profitable to know English."

  And though children usually speak Kubachinsky in the home, "we've noticed
that in the schoolyard, most of the children speak Russian. They even bawl
each other out in Russian," Kurvan said, his wizened face breaking into a
smile.

  "There's a battle for these languages going on now," said journalist and
opposition activist Magomed Shamilyev, a member of Dagestan's majority Avar
ethnic group in the regional capital Makhachkala.

  Radio and television programmes are broadcast here in 14 languages, but as
more of the region's 60-percent rural population moves to cities in search
of work, the smaller languages are at risk of vanishing, Shamilyev said.

  And while there is a regional law reinforcing the status of Russian as an
official language, "there is no law on national languages, no law to
protect and develop the languages that are disappearing," he said.

  Factory director Akhmedov is living proof of how times are changing. Asked
how a simple welcome would sound in Kubachinsky, he hesitated, then let a
few words of Russian slip in while he spoke.

  "He spends too much time in the city," laughed one of the factory's
workers.

  After an embarrassed smile, Magomedov repeated the phrase fluently.

  "There is a risk these languages will disappear," he said, "but we
preserve them in our hearts."