Monday, April 15, 2019

Turkic Nations within Russian Federation Fight Moscow’s Effort to Divide and Assimilate Them


Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 15 – Since Soviet times, Moscow has promoted the division and linguistic assimilation of the Turkic peoples under its control, but many of the latter are fighting back with plans to form common languages either among all of them or among sugroups in order to be in a better position to resist and to reach out to Turkey.

            That resistance faces many obstacles, including some that have nothing to do with Moscow’s policies such as variations in the orthographic and phonetic patterns found in this broader linguistic community. But it is important not only for the survival of these nations but also as an indication of Moscow’s intentions.

            As Ramazan Alpaut of the IdelReal portal points out in an important article, some Turkic groups are growing in number while others are declining, according to the Russian census, but  in all cases, those speaking the native languages make up an ever smaller share of these populations (idelreal.org/a/29102022.html).

            In recent decades, Moscow has promoted a linguistic policy specifically aimed at the Turkic nations, Alpaut says. On the one hand, it has encouraged them to cooperate in ways that allow this to serve as an attractive advertisement to Turkey. But on the other, it has insisted that this take place not in a Turkic language but in Russian (idelreal.org/a/29063142.html).

            Suher Ecker, a Turcologist at Ankara’s Bashkent University, says that the Soviets exaggerated the phonetic differences in the Turkic languages of the Soviet population in order to separate and thus weaken the Turkic peoples and make them more susceptible to rapid Russian assimilation.

            He argues that it would be possible to develop a single language standard for all of these Turkic peoples, who are part of the Kipchak group. Such a language would have to be based on Turkish and not as many assume on Tatar and Bashkir because those two Turkic languages are orthographically and phonetically more distinct than the other Turkic tongues.

            (Ecker doesn’t say and Alpaut doesn’t develop the point, but this fact explains some of the reasons why these two largest Turkic nations within the current borders of the Russian Federation face particular challenges in extending their influence to other Turkic nationalities there.)

            Tatarstan historian Damir Iskhakov says that the Soviet policy of changing the alphabets to divide Turkic nations in some cases had just the opposite effect. In both the Altai and Khasia, he says, the creation of a literary language had the effect of uniting several Turkic groups into one nation, the Altai in the first case and the Khakass in the second. 

            In contrast to Ecker, the Tatar scholar argues that Tatar could be modified sufficiently to become a common Turkic language within the Russian Federation, a basis for unity among that country’s Turkic nations and at least a half-way house toward the formation of a common Turkic language worldwide. Bashkir could converge with Tatar as a first step in this process.

            A lot will depend on Moscow’s policies, he continues. “If Moscow’s interests remain directed at assimilation, then the implementation of this policy would mean with opposition from the center. If, however, Moscow sees in this the possibility of extending tis cultural influence, then the Tatar factor could be used to extend Russia’s influence.”

            A third view on these complicated issues is offered by Garun-Rashid Guseynov, a socio-linguist from Daghestan, argues that using Tatar as a base for unity will be difficult because of the specific vocalism in Tatar and the differences between Tatar and the Turkic languages of the North Caucasus. 

            He proposes instead the formation of a common set of norms for the Kuman subgroup of Turkic languages which include Kumyk, Karachayevo-Balkar and Crimean Tatar “in combination with Nogay,” although unifying that grouping would face “problems of a phonetic character.”

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