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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 850

Part of Session 133: Ethnicity, Language and Culture in a Post-Soviet Multi-Ethnic City (Other abstracts in this session)

Linguistic Vitality, Uses and Attitudes in a Post-Soviet Multi-Ethnic City: The Case of the Crimean Tatar Youngsters of Simferopol

Authors: Cabal-Guarro, Miquel
Submitted by: Cabal-Guarro, Miquel (University of Barcelona, Spain)

On the basis of the data obtained from the survey that I took in 2011 amongst the students of several Crimean Tatar schools throughout the peninsula of Crimea, the proposed article focuses on the results of the upper grade students of the Simferopol school Nº42, the only Crimean Tatar school of the Crimean capital city.

Notwithstanding the difficulty to assess the vitality of a language with empirical methods (McEntee-Atalianis 2011), this article attempts to figure it out of the data, as well as at the light of the first-hand field observation. Despite the language is seldom or never spoken, it’s still the main identification element of the Crimean Tatar identity.

The paper also insists on a legacy from the Soviet times: native language versus first language, a terminological problem that contributes to mislead many of the survey-based ethnolinguistic investigations in the post-Soviet space (Shulga 2009). The paper illustrates the divergence between the declared native language and the stated everyday language uses (Kulyk 2011).

The article describes as well the extremely politicized approach to the linguistic issue in Ukraine and especially in the Crimean peninsula, and analyses the concept of ethnicity (natsionalnost) in contrast with that of the linguistic identity (Arel 2002; Wylegała 2003), in order to finally reveal, on the one hand, the linguistic attitudes of the Crimean Tatar youngsters of Simferopol regarding Crimean Tatar, Russian and Ukrainian languages and, on the other hand, the language uses in the everyday life.

References

Arel, Dominique. 2002. “Interpreting ‘Nationality’ and ‘Language’ in the 2001 Ukrainian Census”. Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 18 (3), pp. 213–249.

Kulyk, Volodymyr. 2011. “Language identity, linguistic diversity and political cleavages: evidence from Ukraine”. Nations and Nationalism, vol. 17 (3), pp. 627–648.

McEntee-Atalianis, Lisa J. 2011. “The value of adopting multiple approaches and methodologies in the investigation of Ethnolinguistic Vitality”. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 32 (2), pp. 151–167.

Shul’ga, Nikolai. 2009. “Rodnoi iazyk: nadumannyi konstrukt ili real’nost’’ [Native language: a farfetched construct or reality], http://odnarodyna.com.ua/topics/1/252.html (accessed on 13 December 2011).

Wylegała, Anna. 2010. “Minority language as identity factor: case study of young Russian speakers in Lviv”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 201, pp. 29–51.