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Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/1229313
FEATURES The fate of endangered languages Tatars make up the country's second-largest ethnic group after Russians, and the Turkic language has more than five million speakers in Tatarstan and elsewhere. But while Tatar is not in imminent danger of extinction, other native Russian languages are in a more precarious position. Among them is Buryat, a Mongolic language spoken in the eastern Siberian republic of Buryatia. Today, just 40% of the region's 300,000-strong ethnic Buryat population know the language to any degree. As native speakers die off without being replaced, it has been added to Unesco's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Bulat Shagzhin had hoped to reverse that decline when he returned to his home region in 2013 after several years in Moscow, where he had completed a degree and built his own IT business. Despite being natives of the region, Shagzhin and his wife spoke little Buryat and decided to enrol in a language class. Aside from one other woman, they were the only participants. "I thought it was strange that nobody wanted to learn the language," says Shagzhin. "So we started to re-popularise it." He created a publishing house for Buryat literature and established a chain of ten language centres, which at the height of their popularity taught 100 adult students. But Shagzhin's attempts to preserve the language went badly wrong. After taking part in protests against changes to language teaching, which were piloted in Buryatia before being rolled out in the rest of the country, the father of two says police and security service agents began following him and visiting him at his office. "They were telling me that I should stay out of politics, that what I was doing was dangerous for me." The family moved back to Moscow, but shortly after they arrived, police came to the door and demanded to search their flat as part of a drugs investigation. Trumped up drugs charges have been used to silence opposition activists and independent journalists in Russia, according to human rights groups. Fearing they were being targeted in the same way, the Shagzhins fled to the US and later settled in Serbia. "The authorities are worried we might be part of an independence movement," Shagzhin told me by phone from his new home. He insists, however, that he is no separatist: his only aim is to ensure that Buryats can preserve their language and culture. While YouTube channels and social media groups with content in Buryat and other Russian minority languages have appeared in recent years, Shagzhin argues that these are not a replacement for teachers and can only be used as an aid. Deadly fallout Elsewhere, the fallout from the new language law has been deadly. In Udmurtia, which borders Tatarstan, the Udmurt scholar Albert Razin set himself on fire and died in front of a local government building in 2019, after appealing to regional authorities not to enforce the legislation. "If tomorrow my language will be forgotten, I am ready to die today," read a placard he was holding – a quote from an ethnic minority Soviet poet. The academic's death was mourned by the community and made international headlines, but it has brought about little real change. According to census data, the numbers of Urdmut speakers fell from 463,000 in 2002 to 324,000 in 2010, and they are continuing to fall. "When children can't speak the same language as their parents, as their grandparents, that is a little tragedy," says Garaeva, once the rehearsal has come to an end. "There is a great deal of stress for us. We have already been made to change so much and, of course, there will be more to come. The weather changes tomorrow and maybe there will be no classes at all." TEACHER REBELLION A Tatar language classroom at Shkola Solntse (Школа Солнце)