Paul Goble
Staunton,
December 17 – Lennart Meri famously described Estonians as a nation which for centuries
had lived on a single slab of rock that was gradually rising up from the pressure
of the last ice age and which used its language as a secret code that allowed
it to live its own live under the pressure of foreign rule.
The
Estonian president’s words about language are especially important: a nation
which continues to speak a language occupiers do not learn can maintain itself
for centuries whatever pressures the occupying powers place on it because the
language serves as a unifying force for those who speak it and becomes
political because the occupiers transform it into.
Indeed,
while some nations become nationalist only after they lose their national
language – the Irish are the classic example of this – most, like the Estonians,
become nationalist precisely because of their attachment to their language and
because under the occupation of others, few outsiders learned it.
Imperial
rulers like the tsars, commissars and now presidents of Russia, can close
schools, newspapers, and public institutions in the national languages
destroying some of the nations they rule or transforming those nations into anti-Russian
nationalists much as the Irish became opponents of the British after learning to
speak English.
But
these rulers can do little except over very long periods of time to destroy the
chief transmission belts of national languages, the families and especially the
grandmothers who not only retain their languages but pass them on in the circle
of their families to their children and grandchildren.
To
be sure, they may ultimately be fated to lose with the passing of generation
after generation; but it is striking how often the reverse is the case and how “the
secret language of grandmothers” becomes the basis for national rebirth even if
imperial rulers and empire-centric ethnographers typically ignore that possibility.
That
makes a new article by Svetlana Niberlyain, a journalist from Kazan who has
been living in Germany since 2002 on “The Secret Language of Grandmothers: How
Udmurts in Germany are Preserving Their Native Language” especially important
and noteworthy (idelreal.org/a/29658222.html).
The journalist spoke with five
Udmurts living in Germany. Some of them are losing their language with the
passing of generations, but others have found ways to keep the language going.
Perhaps the most interesting of the give is Olga Ignatyeva, an Udmurt married
to a Hungarian and living in Nurnberg who maintains an Udmurt language blog, kepics.tumblr.com/.
She grew up in Udmurtia, graduated from
the Finno-Ugric division of the Udmurt State University, and then did graduate
work in Hungary where she defended her dissertation I 2011. A year earlier, she
moved to Germany with her Hungarian husband. She has two daughters, aged six
and seven.
Olga decided to start her blog to
tell her relatives in Udmurtia about her children and to link her children into
the Udmurt world. She and her family
members speak Hungarian at home primarily, then German and only then
Udmurt. Udmurt is suffering lexically,
she says, but it remains important for her and her children – and her husband
understands but doesn’t speak it.
She says that her children “are
beginning to understand that Udmurt is our own secret language” and that when
it is used in an argument, things are becoming serious. This is reinforced by
the numerous visits she and her children have made to Udmurtia where they can
see that many people speak Udmurt.
But the children’s visits there have
another impact: they see Russian on television and then ask why they aren’t
learning that language too. They have
become more insistent about that because of the large number of Russian speakers
now living in their neighborhood. But
Olga continues to speak Udmurt – and the children are retaining it as well.
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