Kamchatka’s Itelmens, with Only Five Native Speakers, Hope to Revive Their National Language

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 31 – One of the numerically small peoples of the North, the 3,000 Itelmens on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, seldom get much attention. In the 1980s, the defection of one of their number in Japan set up a minor boomlet of interest and more recently the mass death of sea life near where they live has again attracted attention to them.

            But as Yekaterina Vasyukova of the Sibreal portal points out, they are a remarkable nation with a unique history and what may be a unique aspiration: Although there are only five native speakers of the national language left, they are committed to the rebirth of their language and with it their culture (sibreal.org/a/30921046.html).

            Because the Itelmen have been a sedentary population for centuries, they far more rapidly assimilated to Russians than did their nomadic neighbors like the Koryaks. They intermarried and were losing their language even before Soviet times, and Russian officials often lumped them together with the Russians as Kamchadals, a collective name for everyone in Kamchatka.

            In the 1920s  and early 1930s, Soviet officials promoted the language and even developed an alphabet for it based on Latin. But when Stalin ordered all languages with a Latin script-based language to go over to a Cyrillic one, Moscow somehow forgot the Itelmen. And their time with a literary language was simply ended.

            Then in the 1950s, the Khrushchev government, committed to creating a Soviet people took steps to destroy the language altogether. Children were taken from their homes, put in boarding schools and punished if they spoke anything but Russian. That effectively killed the language as an entire generation was lost.

            Only two decades later did the first circle of Itelmens who wanted to recover their language form. But there were few books in the language, now supplied with a Cyrillic-base, and after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, there has not been a single book published in Itelmen, although there is an Itelmen-Russian dictionary still in use.

            Now activists are promoting both the national language and the national culture. There is one class for those who want to learn Itelmen. Four of the five enrolled are Itelmens, but all of them are over 70. Last year, the Kamchatka University began offering a course, but it too is small.

            But Viktor Ryzhkov, the instructor, is optimistic. According to Vasyukova, “he believes that the Itelmen language can still be returned to life.”  All that is needed, he says, is a desire to have that happen. No state programs or anything like that will help if people themselves don’t want it.”

            However, the instructor says, “now I see that there are people who want to study their language. They aren’t large in number, but they do exist.” On them the future of the Itelmen language and the Itelmen nation depends.