Indigenous Languages of the North, Siberia and the Far East: Current Status and Development Prospects

Abstract

The study was carried out with the focus on the current issues of sociolinguistics related to the search for ways to preserve the languages of small peoples. The article systematizes data on the state of the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation living in the North, Siberia and the Far East, presented in modern publications of historians and linguists, and the documents that reflect the results of the 2010 population census of the Russian Federation, considers the influence of sociolinguistic factors on the language situation in these territories. Having analyzed the world experience of legal language legislation on preserving the cultures and languages of small peoples, the authors attempted to apply some global criteria to the Russian legislation and socio-economic practice and identified socially significant criteria for establishing the language situation in relation to the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation living in the North, Siberia and the Far East: the total number of speakers of the language, the use of the language in the education system, the availability of educational and methodological materials for teaching, the factor of inter-generational transmission of a language, the attitudes to the functional benefits from practicing the language among its native speakers. By compiling a methodology for categorizing the language survival type five prototypes of the language state were identified on the basis of statistical data: safe; relatively safe; endangered; critically endangered; close to extinction or dead languages. The authors offered a set of extralinguistic criteria for obtaining objective data on the state of the language and made a supposition that despite the evidence that the languages of the indigenous small-numbered northern peoples of the Russian Federation, with rare exceptions, are on the verge of extinction, significant efforts are being made by the government of the country and the indigenous northern peoples themselves to preserve these languages.