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The grassroots initiatives for revitalization of Kalmyk: who is involved in language planning, and how?
The paper aims at analyzing different aspects of bottom-up multilingual projects designed for maintaining Kalmyk with the focus on the agency of young speakers. Despite its official status as the second official language in the Republic of Kalmykia, Russia, Kalmyk is an endangered language. Nowadays, Russian is the dominant language, and the majority of those who speak Kalmyk fluently belong to the senior age group. However, a revitalization movement started not so long ago, led mostly by young Kalmyks living in the cities and using a mixed Kalmyk-Russian code with low prestige.
This paper is based on narrative interviews with activists held in 2018–2020 and on observations of offline and online communication. It aims both to describe bottom-up Kalmyk revitalization initiatives as sociolinguistic practice and to analyze the activists’ efforts to include mixed or low-status language practices in the public sphere, which has usually been reserved for ‘pure’ standard Kalmyk. The revivalist initiatives in Kalmykia have created a group of people who share new teaching practices and who are trying to re-define the agency and understanding for reversing the language shift. It also makes visible ‘new speakers’ as members of the community. These language activists are laying claim to a ‘sociolinguistic citizenship’ in Kalmykia. The high visibility of these new mixed forms of Kalmyk sometimes provokes the reaction that the language of young Kalmyks is viewed as a ‘non-authentic’ code by older generations. Some language activists use different varieties in online communication and try to legitimate a mixed code as part of Kalmyk and as means for the revitalization of the language.