Vanishing vernacular (fwd)

Wed Dec 27 21:30:47 UTC 2006

Posted on Mon, Dec. 25, 2006

THE SPOKEN WORD | For one tribe, its native tongue is virtually foreign

Vanishing vernacular

In Siberia and elsewhere, thousands of languages are headed for
extinction.

By Alex Rodriguez
Chicago Tribune
FEDOR BARANOV | MCCLATCHY TRIBUNE
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/16314284.htm

[photo inset - In Bekovo, Russia, Marina Kushakova teaches children the
Teleut language. She must rely on a Teleut picture dictionary and
lesson materials in Shor, a similar language.]

BEKOVO, Russia | The dying flickers of the Teleut language can be found
here in southern Siberia, where the coal industry blackens the sky of
what once was a thriving nomadic nation.

In most Teleut households in this hamlet, only Russian is spoken. Teleut
is kept alive by Bekovo’s older generation and Marina Kushakova, who
weekly teaches a handful of 9-year-old Teleuts the rudiments of the
language.

Linguists have logged about 6,900 languages around the world, and they
expect half to disappear in 50 to 100 years. When they vanish, whole
cultures and vast storehouses of knowledge will be gone.

“Language is the embodiment of human knowledge,” said Russian linguist
Andrei Filchenko, who devotes much of his work to recording and
preserving Siberia’s disappearing languages. “It’s the result of
centuries of survival, and it’s our window into the way people
understand the world around them.”

The Teleut, a tribe that once spanned from the steppes of southern
Siberia into northern Mongolia, speak one of those languages on the
brink of extinction. Only 2,900 Teleut are left in Russia; only one in
10 speaks the language fluently.

Once the Teleut language disappears, said Maria Kochubeyeva, president
of the Association of Teleut People, “the nation disappears.”

In parts of the world, linguists are battling to revive endangered
languages. The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project researches
scores of dying languages and creates dictionaries and textbooks for
many of them.

Roughly 1.6 million people make up what is left of Siberia’s 30
aboriginal tribes. For centuries, the tribes hunted, fished and raised
reindeer relatively undisturbed. In the 16th century, Cossack explorers
paved the way for Russian settlement, and by the 17th and 18th
centuries, legions of Russian peasants escaping serfdom were streaming
into the region.

The biggest threat to the aboriginal groups, however, came with the
advent of the Soviet era.

The Soviet Union’s unspoken policy of forced assimilation wore away what
once was a rich mosaic of indigenous peoples. The territorial lands of
Siberia’s indigenous nations were wrested away by Soviet authorities.
Families were herded into collective farms, where their languages and
heritage began giving way to the sweep of Russification.

In the 1960s, the decline of many tribes accelerated as the state laid
claim to reindeer pastures and hunting grounds that held vast stores of
oil, natural gas and minerals. In south Siberia, coal mining drove
Teleut and Shor populations off their native lands.