Abstract
This paper analyses the presence and absence of local languages in the visual sphere of Chersky, a small settlement located in the Nizhnekolymsk Rayon (Lower Kolyma County) in the far northeast of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation. The linguistic landscape—the elements of language present in public space—can be seen as a reflection of the sustainability of a language and indeed the cultural identity of a group. An assessment of Chersky’s linguistic landscape reveals that despite the region being home to Russian, Sakha, Eveny, Chukchi, and Yukaghir speakers, not all of these languages have a presence within the landscape. We analyze the ways in which the indigenous Eveny, Chukchi and Yukaghir languages are excluded from the linguistic landscape in favour of Russian, Sakha, and even English; these local languages are subsumed within a discourse that highlights the region’s belonging not only to the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), but to the Russian Federation as a whole.
Keywords
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- 1.
According to Vakhtin et al. (2004), the Russian population has always been larger than that of the Sakha in the Lower Kolyma, and so the influence of Sakha culture has been significantly less present there than in the middle Kolyma.
- 2.
In the Soviet historiography that deals with the colonial conquest of Siberia , the trope of the voluntary “entry” into the Russian state and friendship between peoples dominated. It was then customary to present colonial conquest as beneficial for the local peoples, who were depicted as less “developed” compared to the Russians (e.g. Bakhrushin and Tokarev 1953). Although there is slightly less explicit paternalism in the current representations, the Soviet language of voluntary entry and mutual benefit are strongly present today as well.
- 3.
See Footnote 2 in Chap. 19 of this volume.
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Sidorova, L., Ferguson, J., Vallikivi, L. (2017). Signs of Non-recognition: Colonized Linguistic Landscapes and Indigenous Peoples in Chersky, Northeastern Siberia. In: Fondahl, G., Wilson, G. (eds) Northern Sustainabilities: Understanding and Addressing Change in the Circumpolar World. Springer Polar Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46150-2_11
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