Sophia Popova THE LAST OF THE SELKUPS: A CASE STUDY OF AN ENDANGERED MINORITY LANGUAGE
Sofiya Popova
Amsterdam, Netherlands
THE LAST OF THE SELKUPS: A CASE STUDY OF AN ENDANGERED MINORITY LANGUAGE
In Russia there are over 185 ethnic groups that have or at least used to have their own language. Most of these languages are so-called minority Uralic languages of small peoples of Siberia, the North and the Far East of Russia. In the research I am writing about the Selkup language — the minority language of the Selkups, that I have been studying during one of the expeditions to the Northern territory of the Russian Federation. The Selkups have a tremendous amount of traditions and beliefs. It would be, however, more correct to say that they used to have them before, as now huge part of them is lost forever. I suggest the reader to take a closer look at how the situation looks today.
The main aim of the study is to give an overview of the current socio-linguistic situation concerning the language contact between the Russian language and the Selkup language on the territory of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area.
The actual study consists of the brief description of some features of the speech of the older generation and some features of the speech of the younger generation. The research is based on the Northern dialect. The material used in this research has been collected by me and my colleagues during the expeditions to Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area. Since 2001 more than twenty expeditions to Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area have been held, we have been working with the Selkups, the Kets, the Evenks and the Forest Nenets. The expeditions were supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Researches and the Russian Foundation for Humanities. The group leader of the expeditions was prof. Olga A. Kazakevich. During the expedition the following types of data have been collected: sociological and demographic data, sociolinguistic data, linguistic data, folklore and data on traditional and modern culture. Linguistic information was the most important for us.
The Selkups are the people in Western Siberia, they are dispersed on a large area between the Middle Ob and the Yenisei in the territory of the Tomsk region, the Krasnoselkup and the Pur districts of the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous area, and the Turukhansk district of the Krasnoyarsk territory. The Selkups speak Selkup. The name selkup can be translated as ‘a forest man’.
The Selkups have traditionally been hunters, reindeer-breeders and fishermen. In the 19th century, when the Russians appeared as permanent settlers on the ethnic territories of the Southern Samoyeds, they introduced many improvements in Selkup’s everyday life and culture. In the Soviet period the economic dependence of the Selkups was aggravated because of the planned economy and the collectivization. In addition there was ideological pressure and political surveillance. In the 1930s the Selkup way of life was badly shattered: they were forced to settle, shamanism was ousted by militant atheism, children were assembled in boarding schools (which meant their alienation from traditional environment and occupations), local life was governed by strangers from far away, both the Russian language and the Russian mass culture became widespread. Now there are not more than 600 Northern Selkup speakers left which is slightly less than one third of the group strength (2166, according to the data of the Census 2002). Different researchers suggested different classifications of Selkup dialects. According to one of the classifications suggested in (Helimski, 1998), there are five Selkup dialects: the Northern, or Taz-Turukhan dialect, the Tym dialect, the Narym dialect, the Ob dialect, the Ket dialect.
Traditional spheres of the functioning of Selkup are family and traditional activities (hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding for transport needs).Once Selkup was intensely used in the religious practices (the Selkup were and partly still are animalists and they had shamans who were responsible for contacts with other worlds and spirits, they possessed spirits-helpers and were able to cross world borders with the help of their spirits). Now, as far as we are informed, there are no practicing shamans left among the Selkups (though there are still people who remember shamanic incantations heard from their shaman-ancestors). In the 1930s the Selkup language started being used in new spheres: education and book publishing, and since the end of the XXth century it is also being used in radio and television broadcasting. Enlarging its spheres of functioning the Selkup language loses the most important for it’s functioning sphere – family communication.
To determine the viability of language is important to know whether the language is transmitted naturally in the family from parents to children. The transmission of the southern Selkup dialects from parents to children has al ready broken a few decades ago. The preservation of the Northern dialect is better. Since the 1970s the Northern dialect was drawn away from big cities and towns and its natural transmission from parents to children almost broke. In small villages where the Selkups constitute the majority of the population (Ratta, Pur Tolka), transmission of the language from parents to children is still preserved in a few families.
All Selkups speaking Selkup are bilinguals with Russian as their second language or sometimes their first language, so there are no Selkup monolinguals anymore. The legal status of Selkup is a status of a protected language of the minorities. The sociolinguistic survey carried out in 1996-2011 among the Northern Selkups showed an existing discrepancy between what people say they wish and what they really do to preserve the Selkup language: almost all of the interviewed parents expressed their wish to see their children speaking Selkup, however, most of them choose to speak Russian with their children regardless of their own linguistic competence in Selkup.
Today, the Northern dialect of Selkup is taught at six rural schools in the districts with Selkup population (the Krasnoselkup and Pur districts of the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous area and the Turukhansk district of the Krasnoyarsk territory) and at one urban school (the sanatorium boarding school in Salekhard). About 160 pupils of primary school and over 20 pupils of secondary school attend Selkup classes every year. In the Tomsk region Selkup is taught as a foreign language. Unfortunately, up to now Selkup classes at schools appeared to be ineffective: students are not motivated, they don’t have language practice. They learn some grammatical rules and some words, however, they don’t acquire proper linguistic competence to become active bilinguals.
In the literature, there are different definitions of a bilingualism presented. Following Aronin, Singleton (2012, pp. 2-7), I would go for a «wide» definition: bilingualism is a situation when speakers are able to speak two languages and switch from one to another, to the extent which is necessary to maintain acommunicative act, so that the use of two languages can be communicatively successful.
Since the focus of this paper is on code switching, this notion needs to be elaborated upon. Further in the research I will provide the reader with examples of different types of code switching in the texts collected from Russian-Selkup bilinguals.
When speakers use two or more languages in their daily life, the structures of those languages are affected in different ways. Following Mayers-Scotton (2006, pp. 233-235) I call these outcomes «language contact phenomena». One of these phenomena is code switching, it occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages in the context of a single conversation. Both languages do not participate equally in the resulted structure. Mayers-Scotton (1997) proposes a model of this elaboration, called Matrix Language Frame (MLF), according to which themorphosyntactic frame of a code-switched utterance is set by a Matrix Language, with Embedded Language morphemes from another language inserted into this frame. Mayers-Scotton distinguishes two different types of code switching: inter-sentential switching, which occurs outside of the sentence or the clause level, intra-sentential switching, which occurs within a sentence or a clause. Russian linguist Chirsheva (2004, pp. 37-46) also identifies «the code of the internal switch», which is activated when the speaker stops speaking one language and starts speaking the other language, so the change of Matrix language takes place.
The Russian language belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, Slavic group, East Slavic branch. Russian is a synthetic flective language. The Selkup language belongs to the Samoyed branch of the Uralic language family.
In contrast to the Russian,the most of the Selkup modifiers (adjectives, most of the pronouns and numerals etc.) don’t agree with a head noun.
During the expedition we have been collecting texts from the speakers of Selkup of different ages. It was interesting for me to investigate how the language is stored in the representatives of the younger generation. In the study I use texts from four informants: Daniil (29 y.o.), Roman (18 y.o.), Irina (18 y.o.) and Emma (40 y.o.).
Daniil and Roman live in Ratta. They are fishermen. They have gained secondary school education. Irina lives in Tolka. She has a little daughter, who is still too little to speak, however Irina has assured us that she will teach her Selkup. Irina lives with her daughter and her mother. She has also gained secondary school education. Emma lives in Sidorovsk. She is currently housewife, she has one little daughter and one little son. Her daughter (6 y.o.) knows one song in Selkup, her son (4 y.o.) can’t say anything in Selkup and hardly understands anything in this language at all. Emma’s husband is also Selkup, he is fisherman, but they never talk to each other in Selkup.
15 texts collected from these 4 informants are being used in current study. Texts differ in size, the longest text is 950 words long, it has been collected from Daniil, the shortest text is 61 words long, it has been collected from Irina. The total number of words in all 15 texts used in the study is 4728 words. Texts also differ in the amount of code-switching. While interviewing the informants we have been asking them to produce any text in Selkup if they can, they could choose the topic themselves. All the data collected during the expedition I took part in included 67 Selkup texts: life stories, hunting stories, folklore texts, songs, from the informants at the age from 18 to 80 years old, and many grammatical materials. Texts collected from the representatives of the younger generation are mainly life stories.
Representatives of the older generation of the Selkups as a whole speak the Selkup language much better than the representatives of the younger generation. They are active bilingual, using both languages in their speech. Most of the them are balanced bilinguals: their proficiency in Selkup and in Russian is more or less equal, however, as mentioned above, Selkup is used much less frequently than Russian.
Grosjean’s model of language modes can be perfectly applied to their speech: they choose the language, depending on with whom they talk, in what situation and what they say. It is obvious that they spoke Russian to us. But when they were asked to tell stories in Selkup, these stories were mostly about reindeer, hunting and fishing, the ancient traditions of the Selkups — it is easier for them to activate the Selkup mode while talking about these aspects of their life. During our stay at the fishing camp Langal and at the fishing camps Mungui and Bekyi Yar, where only the Selkups live and work, weheard much more of the Selkup language, than in the bigger towns and cities. All representatives of the younger generation of Selkup, who speak their ethnic language, are unbalanced bilinguals, their level of proficiency in Russian is much higher. Most of them are passive bilinguals, who have gained some knowledge about their ethnic language from their parents or from school, however, never used it to communicate. Those who are active bilinguals are mostly fishermen or reindeer keepers, so they spend a lot of time outside of cities and towns, in settlements, factories and fishing camp. The degree of proficiency is thus correlated with the activities speakers are exposed to. These active bilinguals activate the Selkup mode only during traditional activities and to talk to the representatives of older generation but never to talk to their peers. Young Selkup people do not consider the Selkup language as their identity that can be used to show hat they are ethnically different from the Russians, they consider the Russian language more prestigious and don’t seem to be worried about the loss of the original language of their ancestors.
During collecting texts from the informants I was mainly interested in investigation on how the language is stored in the representatives of the younger generation. It was not easy to record long detailed texts from them, so all our texts are relatively short.
It has been expected that all the texts collected from the speakers of the younger generation will contain a lot of code switching. However, it turned out differently.
Speakers used two different strategies: texts collected from female speakers (from Irina and Emma) are relatively shorter and they spoke extremely slowly, thinking about each word they say, these texts are unnatural and hardly have any code switching examples, while male speakers (Roman and Daniil) spoke faster, without paying much attention to the word choice and they produced longer texts with many code switching examples. These two strategies represent two different language modes. The mode female speakers used is activated only to speak to the linguistics, it is unnatural and the Selkups would never use it to talk to each other. The mode activated by male speakers in these texts is more natural, they could easily talk to other Selkups using this mode.
Now I would like to take a closer look at the examples of code switching. The first line shows the original phrase in Selkup (and partly in Russian), followed by a word translation. The third line is a translation of the whole phrase to English. Code-switching examples in the original sentence and in the translation are highlighted in italics. Morphological analysis is present when necessary.
The only example of code switching found in texts collected from Irina is the Russian word «saDik» with Selkup Illative case suffix «ty»:
(1) tymty sadik-ty korasa
theregarden-ILLwent
‘She went to the garden there’.
However, according to Mayers-Scotton (2006), this example should be treated as a borrowing.
The texts by Daniil and Roman are longer and they contain more examples of code switching, the number of code switching is greatly increased by the end of the text, when the informants became more tired, what proves that one of the reasons of their code switching is fatigue effect. Texts contained 22 examples of inter-sentential code switching:
(2) tap qumyt mē mē qumyt da ja ne znayu kak eta these people our our people well I not know how it ‘These people, our, our people, well I don’t know how to say’.
(3) Kunari ådǝp orɤoldǝ patsäqyt.Vot eto masterstvo, eto nado umet’.
wild deer keep in this is leafy forest this is the skill, this need be able to
‘You have to keep wild deer in the leafy forest. This is a skill, you need to have a skill for this’.
The reason for the code switching in (2) may be speaker’s fatigue and possibly heightened emotionality. He tries to explain something very important for him about the Selkups, but he doesn’t succeed in finding a word in Selkup. Texts contained 31 examples of intra-sentential code switching:
(4) qumǝt šolgum u nas people selkup ours р‘Our people are Selkups’.
(5) odat mǝrot gde-to sorok golov
deerkeptabout forty heads
‘They kept about 40 deers’.
The reason in code switching in (5) is possibly the low level of the speaker’s proficiency. It is easier for him to count in Russian, apparently, he is used to activate the Russian mode while dealing with the numbers, because the Selkups always sell deer meat and fish to the Russians.
(6) Ohot tymdy ileptɛt tap pereval-qot tymdy namanty qumyt ezot naχ śöɤumyt.
before here lived when pass-loc here many people were disc selkups
‘When we lived here in the pass, here were many people, selkups’.
In (6) the informant uses the Russian word pereval (‘pass’) with a Selkup Locative case suffix qot.
(7) Tybyn qabi mohalqyndy nil’džipyatno eŋa.
he os course on the back this spot is
‘Of course, he has this spot on his back’.
In (7) the informant uses the Russian noun pyatno ‘spot’ with the Selkup modifier nil’dži‘this’. As modifiers don’t agree with noun head in Russian, nil’dži‘this’ has no agreement markers.
(8) tože special’-nyjtǝp andy mēqot.
also special-3sg.m well vetka make
They also make special canoe.
In (8) the informant uses the Russian adjective special’nyj‘special’ with the Selkup noun andy ‘canoe’. It is noticeable that the adjective is in singular masculinum form. However, the Russian word for andy ‘canoe’ is vetka (femininum)[1]. My hypothesis is that the informant uses the basic form of an adjective (3sg.m) due to the absence of agreement between modifiers and head nouns in Selkup.
Intra-sential examples of code switching are mostly discourse markers:
(9) man nymty sovsem qupa esomyn
I there at all little was
‘I was so little there’.
Discourse marker nah, often used by both speakers is, is originated from the Russian swearword:
(10) qabij däp aj mǝryktyt nah
of course deer too kept disc
‘Of course, they also kept deer here’.
At the end of the text the narrator changes the matrix language to the Russian language (an example of the code of the internal switch from (Chirsheva, 2004, pp. 37-46)) and then we face the text in Russian with some insertions in Selkup.
(11) jišo kagda ni vyras odap pryam vot za makušku
yet when not grown deer straight here over vertex
‘When the deer is not grown yet, grab his vertex’.
In (11) it is clear that even when the informant speaks Russian, which is obviously easier for him, he still uses the Selkup word odap instead of the Russian word for the ‘deer’. He mainly speaks about the deer’s with the Selkups — so again, he is used to activate the Selkup mode in this situation.
In this research I have taken a closer look at the current socio-linguistic situation concerning the Northern dialect of the Selkup language. All the Selkup speakers are now bilinguals, they speak both Russian and Selkup. The representative of the older generation are balanced active bilinguals, however, Selkup is used much less frequently than Russian and they hardly ever use it to talk to the representatives of the younger generation — as a result, family transmission is being broken. Texts, collected from the representatives of the younger generation, clearly show that it is much easier for them to speak Russian and Selkup is not native for any of them: texts are either very short, unnatural and produced very slowly or contain a lot of code-switching examples. These examples prove that the main reason of code-switching for these young informants is the low level of proficiency in Sekup.
Taking into account the current situation, we have to admit that, if nothing changes, what has lately happened to the rest of the Selkup dialects is about to happen with the Northern dialect. We are not able to fully preserve it alive, however, we still have a chance to explore this rich heritage.
Glossary
1, 2, 3 – 1, 2, 3 grammatical person;
disc – discursive marker;
loc – Locative case;
m – Masculinum;
sg – Singular.
Bibliography
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2) Chirsheva,G. (2004). Bilingual communication. – Cherepovets: ChSU.
3) Döpke, S. (1992). One parent one language: an interactional approach. – Amsterdam.
4) Grosjean, F. (2001). The bilingual's language modes. In One Mind, Two Languages: Bilingual Language Processing, Nicol, J. (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
5) Helimski, E. (1998). Selkup. InUralic languages, Abondolo, D. (ed). – London and New York: Routledge.
6) Mayers-Scotton, C. (1997). Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching.– Oxford.
7) Mayers-Scotton, C. (2006). Multiple voices : an introduction to bilingualism. – Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
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[1] The word vetka ‘canoe’ was suggested as a Russian translation for Selkup word andy ‘canoe’ by all Selkup informants who have been asked to translate it.