Words Like Birds: Sakha Language Discourses and Practices in the City (Borderlands and Transcultural Studies) - Hardcover

Ferguson, Jenanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1496208889 ISBN 13: 9781496208880

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Synopsis

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 reveals how Sakha ways of speaking became emplaced in villages and the city’s private spheres. Focusing on the language ideologies and practices of urban bilingual Sakha-Russian speakers, Ferguson illuminates the changes that have taken place in the first two post-Soviet decades, in contexts where Russian speech and communicative norms dominated during the Soviet era.

Weaving together three major themes—language ideologies and ontologies, language trajectories, and linguistic syncretism—this study reveals how Sakha speakers transform and adapt their beliefs, evaluations, and practices to revalorize a language, maintain and create a sense of belonging, and make their words heard in Sakha again in many domains of city life. Like the moveable spirited words, the focus of Words Like Birds is mobility, change, and flow, the tracing of the situation of bilinguals in Yakutsk.
 

About this title

About the Author

Jenanne Ferguson is an assistant professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Nevada–Reno.
 

Review

“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 (J. A. Dickinson 2018-03-05)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1496208889
• ISBN 13: 9781496208880
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336