Mari und Mordwinen im heutigen Rußland: Sprache, Kultur, Identität

This book is about two Uralic peoples of Russia and their languages. It has three parts: a ‘General part’ (with two papers), followed by a part containing linguistic contributions, and then a part dealing with culture. I shall only discuss the linguistic part. However, one might note that religion and mythology are treated in a fair proportion of the papers in the third part, e.g. in ‘Sacred groves and their meaning for the rebirth of Mari religion’ by Vladimir Kudrjavcev.

Michail Mosin's paper, ‘Bilingualism and ethnic identity in the Mordvin Republic’ presents a (depressingly familiar) situation of ‘one-sided bilingualism’ in which speakers of Mordvin languages also know Russian, but Russian speakers do not know the Mordvin languages, which are clearly threatened. His proposed solution involves the formation of a single standard language from the two Mordvin languages (Erzja and Moksha). This position is also held by Gábor Zaicz (‘Current questions of the development of the Mordvin written languages’). Although he is writing about Mordvin, he cites (55) some distressing examples of intolerance in the Mari Republic, including the following: a bus passenger says, “These Mari are really shameless, speaking their language in a public place”. It should be pointed out that according to at least some scholars, including Zaicz, the existence of two Mordvin languages is “artificial” (59) and is based on a political factor (the divide and rule policy which was applied to various areas of the Soviet Union). Zaicz makes some suggestions about a unified standard language.

In ‘Language use and attitude towards their own language among the Mordvin today (an empirical study)’ Veronika Kampf discusses results from a survey of speakers of different types both within and outside of the Mordvin Republic. Questions on language use included which languages were used with different types of family members (e.g. grandparents, siblings), and which languages were written and read, and listened to on the radio and television. A result that is quite worrying is that members of the intelligentsia speak to their children either exclusively or mainly in Russian. Although, as we have seen, some scholars advocate the creation of a single standard Mordvin language, one of the results of the part of the survey on language attitudes is that members of the intelligentsia disagree with this, as, in general, do inhabitants of the villages involved in the survey.

Merja Salo's paper, ‘The status of Mordvin and Mari in the school curriculum’, contains some more information that might lead one to be concerned about the future of minority languages in Russia. For example, although after the fall of the Soviet Union there were some signs of an improvement in the situation of Mari with respect to education, now in the Republic of Mari El, according to Salo, “the official attitude to the Mari language is extremely negative; efforts are being made to drive it back into the home” (112).

More bad news is given in ‘Multi- and monolingualism in Eastern Mari village communities’ by Seppo Lallukka, which presents data on rural Mari outside of Mari El. Language is a major part of Mari identity: Lalluka states, “Our survey of Eastern Mari demonstrates that language presents the ethnic marker that by far surpasses all others in importance” (156). However, due to the fact that, unlike knowledge of Russian, knowledge of Mari does not give one a significant advantage for such purposes as finding work, “many of the young Mari, and even their parents, have increasingly come to view their native language as unnecessary, and even useless” (168).

A language which is not mentioned in the title of the book receives attention in Jorma Luutonen's paper ‘About the development of the social position of the Mari and Chuvash languages’. As discussed in this paper, Chuvash, a Turkic language, has at times fared better than Mari in Russia and the Soviet Union. However, one should be concerned about its future (as well as that of Mari), given, for example, the fact that more educated and urban Chuvash parents “predominantly speak Russian with their children” (145).

The papers that I have mentioned so far are largely of a sociolinguistic nature. Some other papers in the book are more linguistically oriented, as they are concerned with details of languages, for example, Margarita Kuznecova's ‘Current developmental tendencies of the Cheremis vocabulary’ (Cheremis being another name for Mari). This paper deals with words occurring in I. Ivanov's Dictionary of new words in Mari (Ivanov 2001). Also on lexical matters are ‘The significance of rare and forgotten words for the development of the vocabulary of the modern Mari standard language’ by Oleg Sergeev and ‘The distribution of neologisms in Mari: results of a survey’ by Monika Schötsel. Sirkka Saarinen writes about ‘The borrowed word formation suffixes in the East and West Mari written languages’; the suffixes in question come from Turkic languages.

The last paper of the linguistic section of the book is ‘The origin and development of the Mordvin written languages in their local variants’ by Aleksandr Feoktistov.

For me, the more interesting papers are the sociolinguistic ones. Although it may be troubling to read about the problems which the Mordvin and Mari languages have faced and are facing, one should know about such problems if one is going to attempt to save these languages. The situations described by these papers do not lead one to be optimistic, but at least some work is going on which may assist the survival of the languages. Perhaps a similar collection of papers published 50 years from now will be able to give a brighter picture.

ALAN R. LIBERT

School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, UK

© 2015, Alan R. Libert