From a restricted to full linguistic space: an ‘affirmative action’ strategy for the Udmurt language

This study analyzes the long-term reasons why Udmurt occupies a restricted linguistic space in the post-Soviet state – the low status of Udmurt, due to Soviet language and other policies; urbanization; population shifts; myths and stereotypes about Udmurts; making Russian compulsory after 1938 – and the consequences of this for the fate of the Udmurt language today (relatively few native speakers). The central argument is that Udmurts have not overcome the Stalinist legacy, which led to the reversal of Lenin’s ‘affirmative action’ policy on non-Russian languages. This stems from the failure of the elites in the Udmurt Republic to pursue an ethnic mobilization strategy to promote the Udmurt language in contemporary Russia. Drawing upon language planning and ethnic policy elsewhere in Russia (Tatarstan) and in the UK (Wales), this article outlines ways to raise the status of Udmurt without generating inter-ethnic conflict, thereby creating a ‘space for all’

New aspects in the study of Mari, Udmurt, and Komi-Permyak

The present paper provides a brief overview of the state of the art of an ongoing research project, the Typological Database of the Volga Area Finno-Ugric Languages focusing on three case studies. The database is a collection of updated research material from three Finno-Ugric languages of the Volga-Kama linguistic area, namely, Meadow Mari (Finno-Ugric, Uralic), Udmurt, and Komi-Permyak (Permic, Uralic). The case studies cover both morphological and syntactic properties of these languages. The paper is structured as follows: in section 1, we introduce the aims of the project and give an overview of the key notions of the database. Then we examine three research topics that are discussed in the database. Section 2 gives an overview of the encoding and usage of predicative possessive constructions in Udmurt. Section 3 addresses the topic of person marking on nominal adpositions in Meadow Mari, Udmurt, and Komi-Permyak. Finally, we examine the feature of reduplication in all three target languages in section 4, then in section 5, we summarize our findings

Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia

This title is published in Open Access with the support of the University of Helsinki.This volume illustrates how language revival movements in Russia and elsewhere have often followed a specific pattern of literacy bias in the promotion of a minority’s heritage language, partly neglecting the social and relational aspects of orality. Using the Vepsian Renaissance as an example, this volume brings to the surface a literacy-orality dualism new to the discussion around revival movements. In addition to the more-theoretically oriented scopes, this book addresses all the actors involved in revival movements including activists, scholars and policy-makers, and opens a discussion on literacy and orality, and power and agency in the multiple relational aspects of written and oral practices. This study addresses issues common to language revival movements worldwide and will appeal to researchers of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, education and language policy, and culture studies

Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia

This volume illustrates how language revival movements in Russia and elsewhere have often followed a specific pattern of literacy bias in the promotion of a minority’s heritage language, partly neglecting the social and relational aspects of orality. Using the Vepsian Renaissance as an example, this volume brings to the surface a literacy-orality dualism new to the discussion around revival movements. In addition to the more-theoretically oriented scopes, this book addresses all the actors involved in revival movements including activists, scholars and policy-makers, and opens a discussion on literacy and orality, and power and agency in the multiple relational aspects of written and oral practices. This study addresses issues common to language revival movements worldwide and will appeal to researchers of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, education and language policy, and culture studies

Building Web Corpora for Minority Languages

Web corpora creation for minority languages that do not have their own top-level Internet domain is no trivial matter. Web pages in such minority languages often contain text and links to pages in the dominant language of the country. When building corpora in specific languages, one has to decide how and at which stage to make sure the texts gathered are in the desired language. In the {``}Finno-Ugric Languages and the Internet{''} (Suki) project, we created web corpora for Uralic minority languages using web crawling combined with a language identification system in order to identify the language while crawling. In addition, we used language set identification and crowdsourcing before making sentence corpora out of the downloaded texts. In this article, we describe a strategy for collecting textual material from the Internet for minority languages. The strategy is based on the experiences we gained during the Suki project.Peer reviewe

Breakthrough in present-day Uralistics

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1197893*es