Russia's disappearing languages (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Chloe Arnold
BBC News, Russia

Northern Russia is home to more than 40 indigenous peoples, all of whom have their own language. But many of them are on the brink of extinction.

Fayina Lekhanova has a broad face with a flat nose and dark, deep-set eyes. She looks exactly like the Eskimos I remember from the books I read as a child but, as she explains, the Eskimos are just one of dozens of tribes indigenous to Russia's far north.

The vast expanse of the Russian Federation, from the Kola Peninsula in the north west to the Sea of Chukotka in the north east, is home to 41 indigenous peoples.

They have evocative names like the Saami, the Nganasan, the Itelmen, the Ulchi and the Tuvinian Todzhins. The area they have traditionally inhabited makes up more than half of the entire territory of Russia.

But today their numbers are dwindling, and their languages are dying out. Some have never even been written down.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6389791.stm

[rodeodance]

1. We did the same with our NavAmericans:

Soviet education programme

But Rodion Sulyandzige, the director of the support group, says that the rigorous education programme of the Soviet period is also to blame for the demise of so many languages.

Roman Abramovich in the Chukotka region of Russia
The governor of the remote Chukotka region is Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich



...........
"At the beginning of the school year, the authorities would round up all the children of the native tribes and pack them off to boarding schools," he told me.

"They had no contact with their parents or their families, and so they quickly lost their mother tongues and picked up Russian instead."

He says, sadly, that he himself was a victim of the scheme. Although he is an Udege from Primorye, near the Sea of Japan, he knows just a few words of his native language.

"Imagine what it was like for these children to come home at the end of the school year and not be able to speak to their parents," he says.

"Of course, I agree that the children needed to be given an education, but I think we're only now beginning to realise what a terrible mistake it was to have done it like that."

[Bobbieo]

2. I believe Fayina may be a Siberian Chukchi - a 1st

cousin to the Alaskan Inuit. Global warming take its toll on all of the Northern tribes.

[xchrom]

3. that is so sad.

nothing makes me more concerned about our human diversity than stories like these.

i simply can not go along with ironing out all cultures til they all finally look like one culture.

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. Wonderful film of Akira Kurosawa called Dersu Uzala based on the journals

of a Russian explorer. Central to the film, was the development of a friendship between the explorer and a nomadic hunter of the Goldie tribe.

Here is brief review of the film I found on Google:

"Given the expanse of the Siberian wilderness as his cinematic canvas, Akira Kurosawa responds with the visually hypnotic, deeply affecting portrait of nature, friendship, and survival in Dersu Uzala. Based on the journals of Russian explorer Vladimir Arseniev, the film opens to a forest that is being cleared for development, and Arseniev searching for an unmarked grave. Transported back in time, a topographic expedition troop, led by Captain Arseniev (Yuri Solomin), encounters a nomadic, aboriginal (Goldi) tribesman named Dersu Uzala (Maxim Munzuk) who agrees to guide them through the harsh frontier. Initially viewed as an uneducated, eccentric old man, Dersu earns the respect of the soldiers through his great intelligence, accurate instincts, keen powers of observation, and deep compassion. He repairs an abandoned hut and leaves provisions in a birch container so that a future traveler would survive in the wilderness. He deduces the identities and situations of people by analyzing tracks and articles left behind. During a violent winter windstorm, he saves Arseniev's life by arranging their equipment into a makeshift frame, in order to secure the straw and provide thermal insulation for the fatally cold evening. At the end of the expedition, he leaves the soldiers by the railroad tracks and returns to wilderness, only to encounter Arseniev again, years later, on another surveying expedition. However, time has begun to take its toll on the independent hunter. In an act of self-preservation, he shoots a tiger - an act which he is convinced would exact nature's retribution - and precipitates his physical decline. Unable to hunt for survival and plagued with guilt over the senseless slaughter of an animal, he accepts Arseniev's offer to live with his family in the city, and gradually fades... staring at the burning fireplace, lost in his memories, crushed in spirit.

Akira Kurosawa transcends the confines of traditional cinema with the startling imagery and camerawork of Dersu Uzala: the barren trees glowing red from the embers of the campfire; the ethereal blue smoke rising as Dersu points out his family's burial site to Arseniev; the long, static shot of the two men looking at the horizon, juxtaposed between the rising moon and setting sun; the seamless tracking of the soldiers aboard a raft, drifting down the river; the frenetic panning sequence as Dersu and Arseniev struggle to reap grass during the windstorm. To define Dersu Uzala as a story about an aboriginal tribesman is to describe humanity through a two-dimensional photograph. Dersu Uzala is an allegory for the environmental toll of civilization, a testament to a profound, enduring friendship, and a heartbreaking portrait of aging and obsolescence."