Tuvin Capital Now has More Signs in English than in Tuvin and Many of Tuvin Ones Contain Errors, New Study Reports

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 20 – Increasingly, the public space of the major cities in the non-Russian regions of the Russian Federation is dominated not by the language of the titular nationality but by Russian and even English, according to a new study by Buryat and Tuvin scholars about signage in the Tuvin capital of Kyzyl.
    They found that 965 signs there were in Russian, far more than the 89 in Tuvin, which were in fact outnumbered by signs in English (133) (nit.tuva.asia/nit/article/view/1298/1610 discussed at sibreal.org/a/istorik-sergey-chernyshov-o-neprostoy-istorii-yazykov-narodov-sibiri-/33203335.html).
    The scholars also found that there were orthographic mistakes in 62.5 percent of the Tuvain signs and, what is still worse, this was the case on “almost 100 percent” of the signs on Tuvin government buildings, a pattern that both marks the decay of Tuvin in the republic and promotes its further decline.
    That Tuvin and Buryat scholars are focusing on this is of course a welcome development, but it isn’t clear what officials or activists can do in those places to reverse this pattern or even prevent it from accelerating in the future, however many promises officials in these republics make.