Moscow Announces Plans to Save Languages at Greatest Risk of Extinction Even as It Pushes More Non-Russian Languages in that Direction

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 6 – One of the ways Moscow works to try to mislead observers about the Kremlin’s language policies is that officials frequently point to what the Russian authorities are doing to save the languages spoken by only a handful of people even as it works to reduce the number of speakers of larger minorities.
    Russian officials and propagandists can always be counted on to highlight the former whenever Moscow is criticized for the latter, a defense that all too often works and leads both specialists and journalists who occasionally write about language issues in Putin’s Russian Federation.
    Nonetheless, Russian efforts to help those nations whose languages are most at risk can only be welcomed not only because they may allow those peoples to retain their languages and identities while others are losing theirs but also and perhaps particularly because they highlight what a government that wants to save a language can do.
    The Yakutsk branch of the Moscow Institute of Native Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation has now announced plans to develop textbooks to help keep four such numerically small language groups alive (nemoskva.net/2025/01/06/v-rossii-sozdadut-uchebniki-po-vymirayushhim-yazykam-korennyh-narodov/).
    These include:
•    The Tofalars, a Turkic nation in Irkutsk Oblast numbering slightly more than 700. But they are on the brink of disappearing because experts say that only three Tofalars speak their national language fluently and that the possibility of passing the language to the next generation has been reduced to almost zero.
•    The Chelkans, a Turkic group in the Altai formerly known as the Lebed Tatars, who number fewer than 1300. They do not have a recognized literary language and thus are being assimilated by other Turkic language groups.
•    The Nanays, who number 11,600 in the Russian Far East, of whom fewer than 1500 speak their titular language according to government officials but only 300 do according to specialists. Their language is rated by the latter as being on the brink of extinction as well.
•    And the Evenks, who number almost 40,000 in Russia but only about 3,000 speak the titular language.
The special situation of the Nanays and the Evenks may explain why Moscow is taking this action: Many of the members of these nations live in China, and the Chinese have a much more developed system of supporting their languages than the Russian Federation has had in recent decades.