Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 9 – Between the last two Russian Federation censuses, the number of people declaring Karelian their native language declined by a greater percentage than was the case for any other nationality in that country which is the titular nationality of a non-Russian republic.
The reasons for that are clear, Leyla Latypova says in her latest Moscow Times article about non-Russians in the Russian Federation, a combination of Russian government policies and the flight of Karelians to Finland (themoscowtimes.com/2025/12/09/in-russias-karelia-neighboring-finlands-nato-membership-deepens-divides-a91178).
Russian policies have attracted the most attention. Because Karelians refuse to give up the Latin script, Russian law precludes their language being the state language of the republic. That situation, originally set up when Moscow hoped to absorb Finland, now leaves Karelia as the only non-Russian republic in which their language doesn’t have that status.
As a result, Karelian speakers cannot insist on its use in official contexts; and Russian officials there have limited their opportunities to use it in others, especially in recent years as relations between the Russian Federation and the West have deteriorated, especially since Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine in 2022.
But another major cause of the decline of Karelian in Karelia is that an increasing number of Karelians have fled to Finland where Helsinki has worked hard to support and even expand its use there and earlier in Karelia. Now, however, those who want to speak Karelian and mutually intelligible Finnish have more opportunities if they move.
According to Karelians with whom Latypova spoke, few of the members of that nationality accept Russian propaganda which portrays Finns in increasingly hostile ways and instead view Finland as what may be their last bastion of support at a time when Karelian as a language is dying in its homeland within the Russian Federation.
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