Erzyan who Spoke Russian Growing Up in Mordvinia Recovered Her National Language Only in Moscow

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 4 – Most Russians and others as well assume that if the language milieu in which a non-Russian grows up in shifts from his or her native language to Russian, those who emerge from it and move to Russian cities will be at a minimum acculturated to Russian and most likely will assimilate to the larger nation.

            Beyond doubt that is the case in many instances but not in all. Some non-Russians who grew up speaking Russian at the expense of their national languages become more conscious of their ethnic identity precisely when they move to Russian-majority cities and, when they do, they seek out those who can help them recover their national language.

            An example of this phenomenon, one that gets less attention than it deserves, is Yezhevika Spirkina, an Erzyan from Mordvinia, who grew up speaking Russian rather than Erzyan, studied in Petrozavodsk and now lives in Moscow. Only there did she turn to activists and online resources to recover her native language (idelreal.org/a/30686051.html).

                Spirkina, who heads the ethno-music group OYME, tells Lyaylya Mustafina of the IdelReal portal that she began to recover her language only several years after she came to the Russian capital and turned to activists who provided intensive courses both in person and online via Skype. 

            “We worked together in a mini-group of three to four people, twice a week for two hours each time. We had homework and the opportunity to speak with each other. That is a convenient format especially for an adult, Spirikina continues. Her instructor, Olga Bogdanova, is based in Tolyatti but teaches Erzyan throughout Russia.

            Spirkina is an ethno-musicologist by training, Mustafina notes, and is interested not only in her own people and other Finno-Ugric nations inside and beyond the borders of the Russian Federation but also in other nationalities including those of the North Caucasus and even further afield.

            That interest has made her more sensitive to her own roots and to the fact that her people, the Erzyan, face the problems other highly dispersed groups do. While they are dependent on what happens in Mordvinia, they also have to take many things into their own hands if they are to survive as a nation.

            Last year, Spirkina’s OYME group took part in the WOMEX ethnic festival in Finland. Unlike most other participants in the meeting, she had to arrange for independent financing because the Russian government and the Mordvin government which is subordinate to it don’t offer such support.

            But the group has found supporters within the Erzyan community and beyond and has shown remarkable entrepreneurial spirit. During the worst of the pandemic in Moscow when their shows were cancelled, they assembled in her apartment and prepared a new album, “Quarantine,” which will be released next year.