Not Only are Fewer Tatars Studying Their Native Language but Schools Now Offers Them Fewer Hours to Learn It Well, Gyylman Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 13 – No one disputes that the number of people who know and use Tatar is declining rapidly, but in the absence of census data, no one can say precisely how much of a decline there has been; and even with materials from the census, no one can be precisely sure how accurate declarations of Tatar language knowledge and use are, Nail Gyylman says.

            What can be tracked with more accuracy is the state of Tatar language use in schools and the media, the Tatar analyst and activist says. And there the situation is extremely dire. Overall, he says, one can say that “Tatarstan remains a leader among the republics in terms of the use of the language of the republic” (realnoevremya.ru/articles/253648-nail-gyylman-buduschee-tatarskogo-yazyka-vs-ravno-zavisit-ot-nas).

            But that is only because of the position it had already at the end of Soviet times. Now, Gyylman continues, it must be acknowledged that “the Tatar language is also among the leaders in terms of the loss of its positions” in all these places, “the result of the educational and language policies of the federal center and its own mistakes.”

            Over the last decade, he says, “successfully begun projects for creating a national higher educational school were destroyed. And now Tatar and other languages of the Russian Federation are step by step being driven out even from the main middle schools.” And elsewhere the situation is if anything worse.

            All successes at the local and rural level and in popular culture can’t make up for the losses in the area of education and most importantly “the destruction of the language milieu.” Symbolic of this decline, Gyylman argues, is in book publishing, a field which was “the pride of the Tatars at the start of the 20^th century.”

            “The print runs of books in Tatar in 2021 were only ten percent as large as they were in 1993 and only about 25 percent of what they were under the tsar in 1913.” Moreover, “the total tirage of books issued in Tatar over the last five years was 20 percent less than the size of the print runs of Bashkir-language books over the same period.

            In his latest article, Gyylman documents not only the decline in the number of pupils studying Tatar but also the decline in the number of hours of Tatar-language instruction available even to them. The first reflects the shift away from the language, and the second equally disturbing the loss of the chance to learn the language well even by those who want to.

            Overwhelmingly, he finds, those are people in the smaller urban centers and rural areas. And what that means is that Tatar is rapidly degrading and becoming what many Russians and some Tatars have said for a long time, a peasant language that can’t possibly serve those who live in cities and want a modern life.