Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 30 – “One of the main
miracles of Daghestan,” philologist Nina Dobrushina says, “is its linguistic
diversity and the fact that despite globalization, local ‘small’ languages continue
to live.” But that miracle is obscured
rather than described by seven myths Russians and others have about the situation.
The first, that “Daghestanis speak
Daghestani,” is the easiest to dispel, the Higher School of Economics scholar
says, because there is not and has never been a single “’Daghestani language.’”
By her calculation, there are currently “about 50,” although the exact number
is uncertain (etokavkaz.ru/nauchnyi-podkhod/sem-mifov-o-dagestanskikh-yazykakh).
Many of the republic’s languages and
dialects – and the line between the two is the subject of debate – trace their
origins to a single language family, the Nakhsk-Daghestani, of “no less than
5,000 years ago … Avar and Dargin or Lezgin and Lak are related, but no closer
than English and Russian,” Dobrushina says.
The second widespread myth about
languages in Daghestan is that their diversity reflects the republic’s
mountainous topography, with the isolation of some villages explaining why
languages have survived. While that may explain part of the pattern, it doesn’t
explain all of it: Chechnya is equally mountainous but has only a single
language.
Some scholars say, Dobrushina says,
that the real explanation is that most Daghestanis practice strict endogamy,
that is, they marry only those within their immediate community. That
reinforces language diversity. Elsewhere, people practice exogamy, marrying
outside their communities, and that leads to linguistic assimilation.
The third myth is that the
linguistic diversity in Daghestan is greater than anywhere else on earth. That
isn’t true, the Moscow scholar says. Diversity in Papua New Guinea is much
greater. Daghestan is more diverse than anywhere else in the Russian Federation
or Europe, however.
The fourth myth is that Russian
scholars have established an exact list of languages in Daghestan. They haven’t.
They continue to debate whether this or that dialect of one language is a
separate language or whether any given language is in reality a dialect of some
other, Dobrushina says.
The fifth myth is that Daghestani
languages are “poor,” that is, that they lack the vocabulary and structure to
handle many “modern” questions. That simply isn’t true. In many cases, they
offer more precise vocabulary and have special grammatical forms that allows
them to be more precise than more “modern” languages like Russian.
The
sixth myth about languages in Daghestan is that they did not become written
languages until the 20th century.
“It is more correct to say,” the philologist continues, “that at the end
of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, many Daghestani
languages began to be written on the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet.”
“In
the 1920s and 1930s, attempts were made to introduce Latin script. But long
before this, people in Daghestan used the Arabic alphabet. And there are
manuscripts of the 19th century, for example, in which an Avar text
is written in Arabic letters.”
And
seventh, it is a myth that “all Daghestanis know many languages.” Rather, it is
the case that “many Daghestanis are multi-lingual. Before the spread of
Russian, residents of many Daghestani villages knew, besides their native
language, the languages of their neighbors and often also the major language of
their area.”
Most
recent scholarship suggests that the most multi-lingual place in Daghestan is
the village of Genukh, whose 500 plus residents speak their own language, two
languages of their neighbors, Avar as a lingua franca within Daghestan, and
Georgian. About 70 years ago, Russian
began to “push out” these other languages, Dobrushina says.
Elsewhere
in Daghestan, speakers of one of the major republic languages may know only it
and now Russian, although “the more educated among even them still know Arabic.”
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