Kumyk could Again Become Lingua France of North Caucasus, Alpaut Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 6 – Kumyk, a Turkic language that was the lingua franca of the eastern North Caucasus before the Russian conquest, could become that again, first in Dagestan, the most multi-lingual republic of the Russian Federation, and then again in neighboring republics where there are now many Kumyk speakers, Ramazan Alpaut says.

            An ethnic Kumyk himself who worked at RFE/RL and now lives in the United States, Alpaut says that this trend is especially striking in Dagestan where, in contrast to other parts of the Caucasus, many members of ethnic groups feely admit that it is dying or already has done so (facebook.com/czechKum/posts/pfbid02iD29J7XZQTTJ3u7zTFkhxGXa36tpFvmGLr4Dwm5kqq3cbEc5UQrPiKB6D9ZjoNvdl).

            In these discussions, he continues, even people who are not Kumyk themselves suggest that it could serves “as a potential alternative to Russian for interethnic communication.” At present, there are more than 500,000 Kumyk speakers in the North Caucasus, far more than the total in Dagestan alone.

            Alpaut suggests there are five reasons why such suggestions are not pie in the sky. First, there is the historical precedent. Before the Russian conquest, Kumyk played that role and even continued to do so in imperial and Soviet times, despite Moscow’s efforts to restrict its use first beyond the Kumyk community and then within that nation itself.

            Second, he says, “Kumyk is relatively easy to learn: it lacks many of the phonetic complexities of other languages of the mount peoples” as “there is no grammatical gender, no prepositions or prefixes, and word formation follows almost formulaic patterns thanks to the law of vowel harmony.”

            Third, it occupies “a rather central position among Turkic languages,” having elements both of Turkish itself and the Turkic languages of Azerbaijan and the Central Asian countries.  Fourth, Those who know Kumyk are those able to communicate easily with other members of the Turkic world.

            Fourth, “census data show that Kumyk has displayed a remarkable resilience” and even growth. “If current trends continue, the Kumyk-speaking population could become Dagestan’s largest linguistic community by the next census, except for Russian speakers, of course,” Alpaut concedes.

            And fifth, the Kumyks themselves lack “the political or demographic resources” to impose their language on other. Those who choose to use it do so because of its advantages, a very different situation than in the case of Russian which is imposed by Moscow and the Russian authorities locally.

            Most discussions of linguistic change in the Russian Federation focus on shifts from non-Russian languages to Russian; but Alpaut’s words about the increasing role of Kumyk for other peoples are a reminder that other and potentially dramatic shifts of this kind are taking place as well with smaller non-Russian nations shifting to languages of larger non-Russian ones.