Full Description
What does it mean to speak Sakha in the city? Words Like Birds, a linguistic ethnography of Sakha discourses and practices in urban far eastern Russia, examines the factors that have aided speakers in maintaining-and adapting-their minority language over the course of four hundred years of contact with Russian speakers and the federal power apparatus.
Words Like Birds analyzes modern Sakha linguistic sensibilities and practices in the urban space of Yakutsk. Sakha is a north Siberian Turkic language spoken primarily in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in the northeastern Russian Federation. For Sakha speakers, Russian colonization in the region inaugurated a tumultuous history in which their language was at times officially supported and promoted and at other times repressed and discouraged.
Jenanne Ferguson explores the communicative norms that arose in response to the top-down promotion of the Russian language in the public sphere and reveals how Sakha ways of speaking became emplaced in villages and the city's private spheres. Focusing on the language ideologies and practices of urban bilingual Sakha-Russian speakers, Ferguson illuminates the changes that have taken place in the first two post-Soviet decades, in contexts where Russian speech and communicative norms dominated during the Soviet era.
Weaving together three major themes-language ideologies and ontologies, language trajectories, and linguistic syncretism-this study reveals how Sakha speakers transform and adapt their beliefs, evaluations, and practices to revalorize a language, maintain and create a sense of belonging, and make their words heard in Sakha again in many domains of city life. Like the moveable spirited words, the focus of Words Like Birds is mobility, change, and flow, the tracing of the situation of bilinguals in Yakutsk.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Transcription and Transliteration
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Short History of Sakha
1. We Have Always Been Adaptable: Frameworks for Sakha Language Vitality
2. Sakha under the Tsars and Beyond: Language Policies and Communicative Norms
3. Like Sweet Cream and Lingonberries: Language, Spirits, and Sustenance
4. One Drop Traveling along a Great Artery: Moving the Ulus to the City
5. Sakhalyy in the City: Language Mixing and Indexing Authenticity
6. Acquiring Russian, Maintaining Sakha: Language Choices and Life Trajectories
7. Ohuokhaj in Lenin Square, Hip Hop in Virtual TÜhulgeter: Adapting New Spaces for Sakha
Conclusion: Words Like Birds
Notes
References
Index
