Isn’t there a correlation between the wealth of the region and the level of preservation of the native language after which it is named? Tatarstan and the Republic of Sakha have the funds, while Kalmykia is one of the poorest regions, with residents constantly leaving.

I’m not sure if it’s that straightforward. Tuva is one example of a relatively poor region, and in Buryatia the level of language preservation is still higher than in Kalmykia. In the republic of Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus, the language is highly preserved and their economic position is not particularly favorable.

Of course, the wealth of a region affects its ability to invest in its native language policy. There are a lot of programs in Tatarstan that are supported by the republican government, from summer camps for Tatar-speaking children to television broadcasts, podcasts and cartoons. It’s obvious that the poorer the region, the less opportunities they have. Of course, migration also affects the situation. But this is not the only factor.

You say that the condition of the Kalmyk language was affected by the deportation of Kalmyks and other disasters. What disasters are we talking about?

The current bad economic situation and high outflow of people from Kalmykia can certainly be considered one of them. And another thing — I wouldn’t even call it a disaster, but the reaction after the deportations was a desire to be even more Russian than the Russians themselves. Higher education is also highly valued. Everyone wants their children to get a higher education, so they study and teach children to speak Russian very well. Being a competent Russian speaker is prestigious.

It would seem that valuing higher education could only be a positive thing. What could be better for the region’s development? On the other hand, there’s some trauma behind this decision, and an attempt to be a loyal group within the Soviet imperial project. The people were willing to sacrifice the Kalmyk language to travel this path.

Another feature of Kalmykia is very strict, repressive control. The government control has always been stricter in the ethnic regions than in St. Petersburg or Moscow. Because of this, they shut down the lively youth dance parties, where people gathered and danced together in the central square of Elista to the dombra, to native melodies. Participation required minimal knowledge of the language, at least basic greetings. But on the whole, it simply entailed the symbolic presence of Kalmyk youth, representing their Kalmyk-ness on Elista Street. Unfortunately, the organizer was forced to leave, and these events stopped being held.

What language initiatives exist in Kalmykia?

They are varied and extremely good. Awareness that the language is being lost has become a very important issue for the younger generation of Kalmyks. I, for one, am a big fan of this culinary blog, where the creator Bairt cooks and explains what he’s doing in Kalmyk.

There’s a famous stand-up comic in Kalmykia, Bair Khodzhaev (“Mandjik’s Notes”). He and his team have made several full-scale comedic films based on his Instagram videos. This is an example of the popularization of the “Baldyr” Kalmyk spoken by young Kalmyks, with a large number of Russian borrowings and strange syntactic constructions. “Baldyr” is what Kalmyks call children from a mixed family, and “speaking Baldyr” is when a Kalmyk speaks badly, with a Russian accent. The idea is that Baldyr can also be spoken in a funny, fashionable and interesting way, and that people have the right to speak the way they speak. This is a very important message and I hope it will spread.

Kalmyk will survive if it is spoken by many people, preferably a younger age group. And, of course, when they start talking, they’re not speaking some high, archaic beautiful version of Kalmyk.

I think it’s important for these minority languages to come into fashion, that knowledge of the language is placed as high as possible on the hierarchy of prestige. Then, I presume, people will start thinking about the language — not just native speakers who inherited it in their childhoods, and not just language activists completing their latest project, but ordinary families who lack freedom of language. In Soviet times, minority languages were often associated with the village and the elderly. I haven’t seen this lately. On the contrary, it is prestigious to know your own language. People used to be ashamed to speak it, now it is shameful not to know it. I remember one Chukchi woman told me, “At first you forbade us from speaking ‘foreign’ and laughed that we did not know Russian or spoke with an accent, and now you say that we do not know our native language, we have lost our culture.” It’s shameful either way.

Yes, it’s terrible, actually.

In the 2000s, Kalmyk speakers in Kalmykia were teased and called “kolkhozniks” or “Gascons”. Each individual exists with all these levels of symbolism and tries to withstand them. I have also seen the growing prestige of minority languages in many communities — it’s commendable, fashionable, and good to speak your native language. At the same time, those who don’t speak the language, or do so poorly, are stigmatized.

But this is actually connected to the Russian linguistic ideology as a whole: it is monolingual and, as the American linguist James Milroy writes, focused on standardization. Russian should be very standard, unified, it should be spoken beautifully. And therefore Udmurt, Kalmyk, and Chuvash should be the same. That’s why it’s important when projects like “Manjik’s Notes” promote speaking a mixed language.

My second book, Language Policy without Politicians. Language Activism and Minority Languages in Russia, turned out to be a little about what could have been. I wanted to write about the fact that, regardless of the official language policy, a lot can be done from the bottom up, grassroots, and how much you can change, what you can respond to. But in the current setting, even this version of language policy is not very feasible.

How do you see this transformation?

In recent years, especially during the pandemic, a lot of fantastic online communities, forums and groups popped up: Strana iazykov (Land of languages), Za iazyki RF (For RF languages), and others. Before, language activists only knew about people in their own circles, those who were doing something to preserve Kalmyk or, for example, Buryat.

With the development of these communities, language activists began to exchange views, meet, organize collaborative projects. There was a wonderful series of video conferences titled “Best Practices for Preserving the Languages of the Peoples of Russia,” where they talked about children’s bilingualism in Yakut or Udmurt, discussed how to draw comics, how to set a background on your phone or use a voice assistant. Alas, these initiatives are crumbling, there are too many problems, and some of the language activists have left the country.

Researchers often distinguish two main dimensions of language activism. The first is protecting linguistic rights, a social movement in support of language (language advocacy), as defined by the linguist from the University of Oslo, Haley de Korn. This is when language activism becomes part of civic activism, the struggle for rights, for the inclusion of the language in the education system, for the opportunity to hold votes or some kind of events in the native language. Protecting linguistic rights is all about being included in the legislation and transformation at a large political level.

What kind of state policy do you envision that would be, on the contrary, positive?

What would be the ideal language policy? I think it would be very flexible and connected with the local level, with language activists — they really respond most quickly to a changing agenda, to requests from native speakers. They know best what the community needs. The overall umbrella part of the language policy could be spelled out, but only the most important things, such as the fact that all languages are equal.

The second point, which I think is very important: linguistic rights are individual-level rights, like any human rights. And we always talk about linguistic rights as group rights, and often in relation to territory. But in general, the language policy should be focused on the rights of the individual, so that these are not the prescribed rights of the indigenous group that lives in the villages, in groups, collectively, but rather the rights of each individual person in this group.