Online media in the languages of Russian ethnic groups: Current state and key trends

Abstract

The paper examines 75 online media outlets, registered in the biggest cities of eight republics of the Russian Federation: Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Chechnya, Mordovia, Dagestan, Udmurtia, and Crimea. The choice of the republics among 22 republics of Russia was determined by the size of nonRussian ethnic groups residing in those areas (i.e. the number of people, who consider their native language a language other than Russian, according to the state census of 20103 ). We supposed that ethno-cultural heterogeneity of these eight republics should be somehow connected with the number of ethnic media registered and issued there: in other words, the bigger the number of ethnic groups in the republics, the bigger the number of ethnic media there. When analyzing online media, we paid attention to the following criteria: the official status of a web-site as media outlet; the choice of languages – Russian language or/and the language of an ethnic group; the owners of media outlets, etc. The research revealed a number of qualitative and quantitative characteristics of online ethnic media registered in the republics under analysis, the challenges they face today, some trends of their development, the role of the state in creating and supporting such media, and much more.

Keywords

• online media
• ethnic media
• ethnic groups
• web-sites
• russian federation