Russia: Losing Words, Losing Knowledge (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Friday, 05 August 2005

Russia: Losing Words, Losing Knowledge
By Julie A. Corwin
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/8/EB6E1384-DC6C-4650-A652-10805DB89226.html

The 9th of August will mark the beginning of the second decade of the
UN's observation of the World's Indigenous Peoples -- an international
day created to register concern for the rights and welfare of
indigenous peoples.

One of these rights is to speak in one's native tongue. However, some
linguists believe that the number of world languages could halve over
the course of this century. Scholars estimate that more than 9,000
languages died in the past two centuries as the result of wars,
epidemics, acts of genocide, and the process of assimilation, "Rossiya"
reported on 11 November 2004. Of the almost 7,000 languages living
today, half of them can be found in only eight countries of the world;
one of these countries is Russia, according to "Rossiya."

Dying Languages

Russia has more than 160 nationalities and 101 languages, according to
the 2002 census and the recently released edition of "Ethnologue," a
reference work cataloging all of the world's languages. While federal
and local policies to promote indigenous languages flourished in the
first 10 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the population of
indigenous peoples in the Russian Federation, and consequently, speakers
of its languages have kept declining. What's more, that trend is
expected to continue. While it is hard to generalize about a country as
large as Russia, the majority of the languages of the numerically small
peoples share at least three common problems. First and foremost, their
best speakers are in many cases elderly. The younger generation often
speaks Russian better than the language of their ethnic group. Two,
there is typically little prestige or economic incentive associated
with mastering the indigenous languages. Three, federal and/or local
programs designed to promote indigenous language use and instructions
are often badly funded or nonexistent.

>From 2003-04, only 47.5 percent of the children of the indigenous people
of northern Siberia and the far east were actually studying their native
language in schools, according to the social-science journal "Sotsis --
sotsiologizheskie issledovaniya" of 24 May 2005. In the southern
Siberian republic of Buryatia, just 40 percent of local primary schools
offer instruction in Buryatian; all teaching at upper levels are in the
Russian language. In the republic of Khakassia in 2002, 35 percent of
students in the republican capital of Abakan were studying Khakassian,
according to a paper delivered by Tamara Borgoiakova (sic) of Khakassia
State University during an international conference in 2002. But
offering indigenous languages in schools doesn't necessarily guarantee
that students will use them outside of class. Of the percentage of
students studying Khakassian in Abakan schools, only 2 percent reported
using the language with their parents, 22 percent with their
grandparents, and no one reported using it with their friends.

The greatest threat to indigenous languages is that their most fluent
speakers are often elderly.

There are any number of explanations for the failure of young people to
embrace their ancestors' language. One is lack of prestige. The most
fluent speakers of indigenous languages are often concentrated in the
villages and rural areas, thus giving the language an association of
"backwardness" among urbanites. Perhaps more significant are the
greater economic opportunities associated with the dominant language,
Russian. However, even the custodians of the Russian language have
concerns that the use of their language is declining, particularly in
the CIS countries. At a conference in Moscow last June, Deputy
Education and Science Minister Andrei Svinarenko attributed the
declining interest in studying Russian to Russia's political and
economic situation. And if Russian is declining in popularity, we can
only imagine how low the status of Khakassian or Buryatian has fallen.

Of course, Buryatian -- with more than 300,000 speakers -- is in much
better shape than dozens of other indigenous languages in Russia. Among
the 11 languages identified by "Ethnologue" as "endangered" is Southern
Yukaghir, a language spoken in northeastern Siberia. In 1859, there
were more than 2,000 Yukaghirs, but over the next six decades the
population declined rapidly due to epidemics and assimilation. And like
so many other indigenous peoples of northern Siberia and Russia's far
east, collectivization resulted in cultural discontinuity and further
population declines.

>From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Soviet government sent all Yukaghir
children to boarding schools, where they were schooled in Russian.
Today, speakers of Southern Yukaghir number only 30 to 150, all of whom
are older adults, according to "Ethnologue." According to "Rossiiskaya
gazeta" on 24 December 2002, Russian ethnologists used to joke darkly
that for every Yukaghir, there are three academic volumes about their
people. The situation is even more dire for the Tundra Ents language of
north-central Siberia. Only two or three of its speakers are still
alive.

The Tuvan Model

Of course, the poor physical health and dismal living conditions of many
indigenous peoples tends to trump all other challenges facing a
language's survival. The Tuva Republic has received high marks for its
language program, but Tuva is one of the poorest regions in Russia.
Tuvin is the language of instruction in 80 percent of elementary and
high schools, according to Borgoiakova. In the majority of Tuva homes,
Tuvin is the only language spoken. The strong position of the Tuvin
language in the republic represents, according to Borgoiakova, "the
most successful model of implementation of language law in Siberia." Of
all of the numerically small peoples of northern Siberia and Russia's
far east, the Tuvins-Todzhentsev had the highest increase in their
mortality rate for the period from 1999-2003, according to "Sotsis."
Their death rate rose by 150 percent.

In the face of such alarming statistics, concern about language use may
seem esoteric. After all, many if not most members of indigenous
populations in Russia can speak Russian, enabling them to function in
their daily lives and participate in the local and national economy.
But language may represent something more than just a means of
communication and a window into a culture.

Some linguists are connecting linguistic diversity with efforts to
preserve and understand the environment. Speaking at an international
conference in 2002, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas of Denmark's Rotskilde
University reported that Finnish biologists recently "discovered" that
salmon can use extremely small rivulets leading to a local river as
spawning ground, something scientists previously thought was
impossible. But the indigenous group the Saami have always known this
and that the traditional Saami names of several of those rivulets often
include the Saami word for "salmon-spawning bed." According to
Skutnabb-Kangas, this kind of ecological knowledge is preserved in
indigenous languages.