Doctoral student Kathryn Graber, under the guidance of Dr. Alaina Lemon, will investigate the relationship between government language policies and the persistance of endangered languages through a case study of how local newspapers affect language shift in post-Soviet Russia. Over the past sixteen years, some of the most central and impassioned struggles in post-Soviet society have concerned minority languages and the publics that they mark or create. Meanwhile, there has been massive restructuring in media funding and control. To examine these struggles as they unfold in both contemporary and historical contexts, Graber will focus on the multilingual Lake Baikal region of southeastern Siberia, where generations of speakers have been slowly shifting to Russian from Buryat, an indigenous language closely related to Mongolian.
The study will consist of archival, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic research on local media production and consumption in Russia's major semi-autonomous ethnic Buryat region, the Republic of Buryatia. Graber's preliminary research has shown that some journalists attempt to moderate Buryat language shift by modeling "proper" Buryat, or by excising Russian words and grammar. Buryat-language newspapers are also one of the main ways in which speakers are exposed to the written language. Yet it is not clear how media discourse affects language use in the wider Buryat-speaking public.
This study will examine the relationship between linguistic decisions in Buryat-language newspapers and the everyday language of ordinary speakers. The investigator's research methods will include long-term participant observation, structured and semi-structured interviewing, sociolinguistic analysis of interactions, and formal linguistic analysis of media discourse.
The research will contribute to better understanding of the factors that underlie language shift and endangerment. The research will help policymakers formulate context-sensitive policy in language planning and development projects. The project also contributes to the education of a social scientist.
