If Current Trends Continues, the Tatar Language will Disappear in 45 Years and the Survival of the Tatar Nation will be at Risk, Lobova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 25 – If  knowledge and use of Tatar decline at the same rate they have over the last decade, Elizaveta Lobova says, then in 45 years, the Tatar language will disappear and the survival of the Tatar nation will be at risk, remaining at best an identity without much content and subject to market forces and political decisions.

            The author of the Tea with Tatar telegram channel says that what is happening now is that Tatar identity is separating from the Tatar language, raising the existential question: “can culture exist without language or is it transformed into another culture?” (milliard.tatar/news/i-tugan-tel-i-matur-tel-tri-mogily-dlya-tatarskoi-identicnosti-9906).

            Lobova suggests there are three possible paths forward. The first makes identity “a consumer choice,” one in which what survives is anything that “can be bought and sold quickly.” Because language requires study, it isn’t one of those and thus may only survive in a narrow circle like Latin in medieval times, “prestigious but dead.”

            That is the preferred outcome as far as Moscow is concerned, she suggests, because it allows the market to do the assimilatory work and destroys the basis of national culture and thus resistance to the wholesale destruction of minority nations like the Tatars within the Russian Federation.

            The second scenario is a national “renaissance from below” in which Tatars save the language by forming social networks and promoting its use even if it is driven out of the schools and most public forums. But that is only a beautiful dream, Lobova says, given that even in rural areas, young people now don’t speak their national language.

            And the third is that without a language to support it, Tatar identity will turn into a souvenir to be dragged out a few times a year but otherwise neglected, something that will lead to its death as well. Moscow will like this scenario best of all because it will insist that it isn’t destroying nations. Instead, they are destroying themselves.

            In the current environment, Tatars who care about their identity must care about their language and seek ways to reverse the current decline, including but not only by restoring the place of the Tatar language in the school system so that the language and as a result their nation will have a future.