indigenous languages
The Troubled State of the
A woman reading Buryat newspaper Nyutag Helen (Dialects) in Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia, Russian Federation.
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Buryat Language Today
T
Dulma Batorova (Buryat)
he Buryat language in Russia is in a critical state, despite the declarations and “efforts” of the local government and some minimal government budget allocations to address the problem. UNESCO has included the Buryat language in the Red Book of Endangered Languages. The situation is drastic to the extent that today, approximately 80 percent of the Buryat population does not know or speak their mother tongue. Since childhood, I have spoken my native Buryat language. Back then, the whole community in my village spoke the language—in the family, at school, on the street. Today, our children, even in Buryat villages, have switched to Russian. In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s we saw a massive exodus of Buryat people from their communities to urban areas, which were predominantly populated by ethnic Russians. The rules and expectations were to speak Russian only, and in order to succeed and do well in the new environment, our people had to adapt by speaking Russian at work, at home, and to our children. In the cities, our people were shamed and harassed for speaking our language in public. That produced a cultural erasure and a break between generations. Many schools offer the Buryat language as a subject, but children study it only if their parents submit a written request, and it is often offered at schools only as an extracurricular activity. In 2014, parliamentarians of the People’s Khural (Buryat Republic parliament) introduced amendments to the law on education specifying that the study of the Buryat language in schools is no longer compulsory. Representatives of various Buryat communities speak many different dialects, live at great distances from each other, and are surrounded by a Russian-speaking population. These dialects are mostly oral and don’t have written sources, making it challenging to regain and grow new
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speakers as most Buryat people speak and use Russian as their everyday means of interaction and communication. A shameful fact about our language history and a strategy used to divide and conquer is that when the official literary form of the Buryat language was chosen, all the other Buryat dialects were banned. As a result of this divide and inter-Tribal politics, our people are now not united around our language revitalization efforts and our language continues to decline. Three years have passed since “The Buryat language in the 21st Century” international forum. Buryatia was represented by the government of the Republic of Buryatia, the Buryat Association for the Development of Culture, and Buryat State University. As editors of the newspaper Nyutag Helen (Dialects), we submitted proposals to the forum on how to create the best environment for Buryat language revitalization. Unfortunately, many proposals so far have not been implemented. We are very aware of the fact that our older generation still speaks the Buryat language, but the majority of our youth does not speak the language at all. In order to popularize our native language, we began to write short articles and essays and publish them in a local regional newspaper. We received a lot of positive feedback and gratitude from our readers. Many said they were surprised that it was possible to write in our Barguzin dialect because our people have been told that it was “rude” and “ugly.” Most people do not understand that language is only stronger in the diversity of its dialects. This is why we came up with the idea to publish a newspaper in existing micro-languages, or dialects. There are five of them in the Buryat language, which are further represented in 14 sub-dialects. The goal of our publication, Nyutag Helen, is to connect Buryat people from all the regions where multiple Buryat language dialects are spoken. The first issue of the newspaper was published in October 2015 and was produced by Tsyren Choyropov (Цырен Чойропов), All photos by Dulma Batorova.
