The Current Situation and the Future of the Tuvan Language in Krasnoyarsk Region: Ethnopsycholinguistic Survey Results

Abstract

The destiny of minority languages is a crucial problem of sociolinguistics. The main objective of our research is to assess subjective factors that may influence the development of an indigenous language in Krasnoyarsk Region, the language being the Tuvan language spoken in the basin of the river Us, a tributary of the Yenisei. The ethnopsycholinguistic method of open-ended statements, applied in our work with the Russians and the Tuvinians cohabitating on the territory, allows us to see the differences in their attitudes towards the current state and the future of the Tuvan language. Generally speaking, the results show that the Tuvan population believes that their language is in the process of survival even while going through hard times. However, they feel uncertainty about the future of Tuvan as it may be at risk of becoming a language of family communication, a language that is totally irrelevant for the most of local society. On the contrary, the Russian population of the region is confident of the future of the Tuvan language spoken in the basin of the river Us. At the same time, unlike autochthonous people, the Russians find a current situation of Tuvan as a disastrous one. Basing on the analysis of the mentioned above open-ended statements experiment results, we argue that the position of the Tuvan language is very fragile nowadays. Yet, it has good prospects provided that the Tuvan population is strongly supported by the authorities in their will to preserve their own language. The fact that the Russian population shares the Tuvans’ concerns over the eventual reduction of the Tuvan language functioning on the territory can be also regarded as a supporting argument. The study of these opinions in the intergroup context gives some clues for predicting the changes in the linguistic landscape of the region

В статье рассматривается проблема витальности миноритарного тувинского языка, функционирующего в условиях тесного контакта с русским. Анализ субъективной оценки жизнеспособности тувинского языка дается на материале психолингвистического эксперимента, который был проведен в населенных пунктах Усинской котловины Красноярского края