What does it mean to speak Sakha in the city?
Words Like Birds, a linguistic ethnography of Sakha discourses and practices in urban far eastern Russia, examines the factors that have aided speakers in maintaining—and adapting—their minority language over the course of four hundred years of contact with Russian speakers and the federal power apparatus.
Words Like Birds analyzes modern Sakha linguistic sensibilities and practices in the urban space of Yakutsk. Sakha is a north Siberian Turkic language spoken primarily in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in the northeastern Russian Federation. For Sakha speakers, Russian colonization in the region inaugurated a tumultuous history in which their language was at times officially supported and promoted and at other times repressed and discouraged.
Jenanne Ferguson explores the communicative norms that arose in response to the top-down promotion of the Russian language in the public sphere and
Trade Review"Informed by an awareness of comparable case studies of Native American and other Indigenous language revitalization projects,
Words Like Birds is itself a must-read not just for specialists but for all who regard language as a critical resource for maintaining Indigenous cultures and for those who know that revitalization and reclamation are so much more than merely language documentation."—Paul V. Kroskrity,
Native American and Indigenous Studies“Ferguson’s vibrant ethnography offers a multifaceted view of contemporary Sakha cultural and linguistic practices, blending analyses of syncretism and language revitalization with explorations of place, movement, and belief to capture speakers’ complex understandings of what it means to be Sakha.”—J. A. Dickinson, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Notes on Transcription and Transliteration
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Short History of Sakha
1. We Have Always Been Adaptable: Frameworks for Sakha Language Vitality
2. Sakha under the Tsars and Beyond: Language Policies and Communicative Norms
3. Like Sweet Cream and Lingonberries: Language, Spirits, and Sustenance
4. One Drop Traveling along a Great Artery: Moving the Ulus to the City
5. Sakhalyy in the City: Language Mixing and Indexing Authenticity
6. Acquiring Russian, Maintaining Sakha: Language Choices and Life Trajectories
7. Ohuokhaj in Lenin Square, Hip Hop in Virtual Tühulgeter: Adapting New Spaces for Sakha
Conclusion: Words Like Birds
Notes
References
Index
