Hebrew Revival & Irish

General discussion about learning languages
Dragon27
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Re: Hebrew Revival & Irish

Postby Dragon27 » Tue Apr 16, 2019 5:50 am

Tatar was a compulsory subject in school too (until this recent development), so I don't see how Bashkir should be any different. Bilingual street signs and other kinds of writings are pretty common here as well.
The only thing I know about Bashkir language situation is that according to 2010 census data there were more (not by much) people speaking Tatar in Bashkortostan, than Bashkir.
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nooj
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Re: Hebrew Revival & Irish

Postby nooj » Sun Mar 19, 2023 9:31 pm

I'm seeing this article doing a bit of round in the press, but for my tastes, it's a little scanty on the kind of information that I personally want. That said, nothing that I see in the article contradicts what I've read in academic papers and books that DO have concrete data, which is that the situation is increasingly negative, if not dire, with the recent language policy shifts in Russia, such as the abandonment of the mandatory language classes in 2018 and the growing centralisation of the state, which impacts the autonomous competencies in language matters.

Languages in Russia Disappearing Faster than Data Suggests, Activists Warn

I have a question for the several Russian native speakers on this board. Have you yourself tried to learn some of the languages spoken in the Russian Federation? What's it like in terms of resources, content and media and how would you compare it to learning foreign languages?
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Hebrew Revival & Irish

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Mar 20, 2023 1:09 pm

nooj wrote:I have a question for the several Russian native speakers on this board. Have you yourself tried to learn some of the languages spoken in the Russian Federation? What's it like in terms of resources, content and media and how would you compare it to learning foreign languages?

I've dabbled in a bit more than a handful of such languages, and I'd have to say that, perhaps unsurprisingly, learning Tatar was the closest to the experience of learning a similar-sized foreign language, perhaps not so much in terms of the availability of resources (although how well it's represented on forvo was a pleasant surprise; I wonder if there's a story behind it similar to the one behind the Malagasy Wiktionary) but in terms of the wide variety of media and content: not just government-owned media or content produced by volunteers and activists, but also something passing for independent and professionally made media. It's probably the minority language of Russia for which it's the easiest to find content that's in the language but about things other than the language itself.

Other languages with their own republics have some standouts, like Chechen with its politically-engaged diaspora, Tuvan with its still large functionally monolingual population and Sakha with its surprisingly thriving film industry, but for the most part their output is limited to a handful of government-owned outlets and somewhat updated editions of Soviet-era self-study books in Russian. Last year I pretty much stopped engaging with any and all media owned by the Russian state outside of work, but before that I kept up with the online editions of some newspapers in regional languages that I had either studied before or could understand passively thanks to my knowledge of Kazakh (Nogai being by far the most similar to Kazakh out of Russia's indigenous Turkic languages, essentially feeling just like Kazakh with a different orthography and more Russian loanwords), and out of all of them the Avar newspaper Ḥaq'iq'at was the only one that struck me as a genuine attempt to create a quality media product rather than a token allocation of budget funds (though I wouldn't be surprised if its budget was also bigger than those of the newspapers in Dagestan's smaller languages). Learning most of these languages was the most similar to learning indigenous languages of Africa or the Americas, especially bigger ones like Navajo or Setswana, that may have large and stable native speaker populations, but quality resources are few and far between and most media is hard to access from outside the region. I've only attempted to learn one language of Russia that doesn't have any official status, Ingrian, and that felt more akin to learning an already extinct language.
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nooj
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Re: Hebrew Revival & Irish

Postby nooj » Mon Mar 20, 2023 2:57 pm

Thank you for that detailed explanation! That's fascinating.

I've dabbled in a bit more than a handful of such languages, and I'd have to say that, perhaps unsurprisingly, learning Tatar was the closest to the experience of learning a similar-sized foreign language, perhaps not so much in terms of the availability of resources (although how well it's represented on forvo was a pleasant surprise; I wonder if there's a story behind it similar to the one behind the Malagasy Wiktionary) but in terms of the wide variety of media and content: not just government-owned media or content produced by volunteers and activists, but also something passing for independent and professionally made media. It's probably the minority language of Russia for which it's the easiest to find content that's in the language but about things other than the language itself.
I read that the Russian government banned the use of non-Cyrillic alphabets specifically to stop Tatar from transitioning to a Latin alphabet (incidentally affecting other Russian languages that already use the Latin alphabet, like Karelian... which is ironic since the Soviets were the first ones to institute the Latin alphabet for many Soviet languages. So what's the situation with the alphabet presently in Tatarstan?
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vonPeterhof
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Re: Hebrew Revival & Irish

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:07 pm

nooj wrote:I read that the Russian government banned the use of non-Cyrillic alphabets specifically to stop Tatar from transitioning to a Latin alphabet (incidentally affecting other Russian languages that already use the Latin alphabet, like Karelian... which is ironic since the Soviets were the first ones to institute the Latin alphabet for many Soviet languages. So what's the situation with the alphabet presently in Tatarstan?

Yes, the ban on the use of non-Cyrillic alphabets for all state languages in Russia was introduced in direct response to Tatarstan's adoption of the Latin alphabet for Tatar, and to this day there doesn't seem to be any official use of that Latin alphabet in Tatarstan. It does seem to be popular among language activists, and not just Tatar ones. As for Karelia, it has the additional "distinction" of being the only republic to not exercise its right to establish a state language in addition to Russian (unless you count Donetsk and Luhansk "people's republics"), even as its government does publish materials and produce media in Finnish, Veps and at least two different variants of Karelian - all in the Latin alphabet. I've seen conflicting explanations as to whether it's the lack of a widely accepted Cyrillic alphabet for Karelian that's preventing it from being adopted as a state language, or if it's the other way round and it's the lack of state language status that's allowing the continued use of the Latin alphabet for Karelian. Serpent might know more about this, if she still reads this forum.
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