Cultures and Languages

Culture” is an elusive concept that is hard to define. A good working definition is “a shared set of meanings that are lived through the material and symbolic practices of everyday life” (Knox & Marston, 2007, p. 29). Culture is learned primarily in early childhood, but also throughout one's life. It includes nonmaterial items, such as language and beliefs; material objects called “artifacts,” such as clothing and housing; and everyday practices, such as shopping and commuting. Because culture is learned early in life, it is resistant to change. Cultural geographers study cultures from a spatial perspective: core areas of cultures; cultural realms and their boundaries; diffusion of major cultural traits; the production and transformation of cultural landscapes; and cultural adaptations to the environment.

Many regions in the world are defined on the basis of their dominant culture(s). For example, north Africa and the Middle East are defined by the prevalence of Islam; Latin America is defined by Spanish and Portuguese colonial influences; and so on. Is there a unifying cultural trait that would apply to our region of study, Northern Eurasia/the former Soviet Union (FSU)? Is it the Orthodox religion? Communist ideology? Adaptations to the cold climate? The defining trait that works best today, in my view, is the presence of the Russian language throughout this region. Although it is home to over 200 ethnic groups, all of these groups had to communicate with each other in Russian during Soviet times. Many ethnic Russians continue to live throughout the region, providing a common cultural milieu.

Languages of Northern Eurasia/the FSU

East meets West in Northern Eurasia, and consequently the languages spoken and understood there are either Western (Slavic or Baltic, which are branches of the Indo-European family) or Eastern (branches of the Altaic and Uralic families). Some languages are spoken by millions; others by just a handful of speakers. The most common by far is of course the Russian language, spoken and understood today by at least 255 million people worldwide. Russian is the 8th most common native and 6th most common overall language in the world (Table 13.1). In the United States at any given moment, there are about 25,000 learners of Russian in more than 400 universities and colleges, and about 3 million people who can speak and understand it. Although the popularity of the Russian language in the United States has declined since the end of the Cold War, it remains one of the top 10 most studied foreign languages in America.

Most of the languages of Northern Eurasia belong to three language families: Indo-European, Altaic, and Uralic. The Indo-European languages are spoken by the majority of people in Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Tajikistan, and Russia. (Again, because Russian was the official language of the Soviet Union, it is widely spoken in all FSU republics.) The Altaic languages, particularly the Turkic group, are common in Russia along the Volga and in Siberia, in Azerbaijan, and in four of the five Central Asian states. The Uralic languages are spoken in the northern and eastern parts of European Russia and in western Siberia. Some unique languages in the Caucasus and in northeastern Siberia belong to the Caucasian and Paleoasiatic families, respectively.

Indo-European Languages

Because you are reading this textbook in English, you already know at least one Indo-European language. Of the top 10 languages in the world (Table 13.1), 7 are Indo-European. Their origin can be traced to a single mother tongue spoken somewhere in the middle of Eurasia more than 4,000 years ago. Some scholars believe that it originated among the people of the steppes northeast of the Black Sea, along the Don River and the lower Volga. These were people of the mysterious culture that left us distinct burial mounds, called “kurgans.” Other scholars (e.g., most American researchers) suggest Asia Minor as another possible center of origin. It is certain that the languages we call Indo-European today spread as far west as northern Europe and the British Isles, and as far east and south as central and eastern India, by 3,000 years ago. The Indo-Europeans were efficient colonizers. Evidently they were farmers and animal breeders with superior technology, which allowed them to wipe out or absorb whatever local populations they encountered very quickly. For example, in all of Europe today, the only native language that has survived from the times before the Indo-European conquest is Basque. Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian belong to the Uralic family; however, these languages are more recent arrivals in Europe. Among the most significant technologies of the Indo-Europeans is probably the domestication of the earliest type of horse around 4000 B.C., somewhere in what is Ukraine today. Worship of the sun was another distinctive cultural characteristic of these people.

All Indo-European languages share word roots and grammatical features that are thought to have been retained from the ancestral tongue — so-called shared retentions. For example, just to use words starting with the letter “B,” the words for “bean,” “bee,” “brown,” “brother,” “bottom,” and “birch” sound very similar in most of the Indo-European languages. The words that are common tend to describe basic concepts—divinities, family members, numbers, heavenly bodies, materials, minerals, colors, plants, and animals—thus attesting to the protolanguage's antiquity. As an example, the English word for “snow” is sneha in Sanskrit (a now-extinct language of the Indian group), snaa in Avestan (Iranian), sniegas in Lithuanian (Baltic), sneg in Russian (Slavic), nipha in Greek (the initial s disappeared), snj?r in Old Norse (Germanic), and nyf in Welsh (Celtic).

The sacred language of the Hindu Vedas scriptures, Sanskrit, is thought to be one of the earliest languages and perhaps the closest to the hypothetical mother tongue of the Indo-Europeans that we know. Lithuanians claim that theirs is the most similar to that language in Europe today. In terms of grammar, Indo-European languages tend to have gendered nouns (male, female, or neutral), with English being a major exception. They also tend to have cases for nouns (flexes); that is, the ending of the noun changes, depending on its position and function in a sentence. In English it only survives in some pronouns—as, for example, in “He came to them,” but “They came to him.” In most Indo-European languages, including Russian, flexing is very complex: Endings can change along three or more patterns, each grouped into six cases! A foreign learner is thus forced to memorize up to 18 possible combinations of endings for every noun. Verb systems also tend to be complex, with suffixes or supplemental verbs indicating changes in tense, gender, and number. Adjectives tend to agree with nouns in gender and number, and this means that they also change their endings.

The majority of the existing 70 Indo-European languages use the Latin alphabet. Some Slavic languages use the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian), while others use their own alphabets (Greek, Armenian, Hindi) or Arabic script (Farsi, Tajik). In addition, Cyrillic continues to be used in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, and all Uralic languages within Russia. It was also used during the Soviet period in the Azeri, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Moldovan languages, which have since been Latinized. The Tajik language went from Cyrillic back to Arabic script. While a different alphabet may present an initial difficulty for the foreign-language learner, commonality in grammar and words makes studying an Indo-European language a much simpler task for an English speaker than mastering some non-Indo-European languages of Africa, Asia, or the Americas.

In Northern Eurasia, the following nine languages belong to the Indo-European family, with the approximate number (in millions) of native speakers given in parentheses:

• Slavic: Russian (145), Ukrainian (40), and Belarusian (9).
• Baltic: Latvian (2.5) and Lithuanian (4).
• Romance: Moldovan (a dialect of Romanian; 3).
• Armenian (6).
• Iranian: Tajik (5) and Ossetian (<1).

The Russian Language

The Russian language belongs to the Eastern Slavic group of the Slavic branch, along with Ukrainian and Belarusian. All three are very similar, mutually intelligible languages sharing over 80% of their basic vocabulary and the Cyrillic alphabet. Before the time of the Tatar–Mongol Yoke, the three languages were practically one. Until the late 18th century, they could be thought of as dialects of the same broad language, with regionalisms that were borrowings from surrounding nations. For example, Russian has many words borrowed from the Tatar language; Ukrainian has words borrowed from, or shared with, Polish. The spoken languages were formalized as written literature evolved in the 19th century. The works of Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) are frequently cited as the first literature written in a truly contemporary Russian, not in the pompous Latinized prose used before him (e.g., by the poets Derzhavin and Zhukovsky). In modern Belarus and Ukraine, virtually everyone still understands Russian with little trouble—a legacy of the Soviet period. Moreover, over 40% of Ukraine's population and over 60% of people in Belarus still speak Russian as their first language, even though they may consider themselves Ukrainians or Belarusians, respectively.

The Russian alphabet has 33 characters, many of which were borrowed from Greek. It is a good idea to learn how to read Russian if you intend to travel in or do research on the FSU. In fact, once the characters are mastered, reading Russian or Ukrainian does not present as much difficulty for an English speaker as, for example, French does; there are few silent letters and few exceptions to the reading rules in Slavic languages. In this sense, Russian is more phonetic, like Spanish, with almost a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. Some letters were specifically invented for the language; therefore, Russian uses few diacritical marks or combinations of letters to represent sounds. Instead of a “ts,” there is a separate letter, ц; instead of “sh,” ш; and so on. Russian vowels are not divided into long or short. Russian consonants, however, may be either hard- or soft-palatalized. In transliterated Russian place names, the palatalized form is frequently rendered as an apostrophe—“the Ob' River.” The “b'” at the end is not a “B,” but rather a “Bee” sound with an extremely short “ee.” I have chosen not to use the apostrophe in this book in such cases.

The difficulty of learning Russian lies not in its alphabet, but in its complex grammar. Although its verb system is simpler than that of English or French (with fewer tenses), the language has many verb forms, both perfect and imperfect, in three tenses. Even worse, there are three declensions with six cases for nouns (Latin has five declensions and may be an even harder language to learn), and nouns belong to one of three genders. Thus one needs to memorize lots of noun endings to be able to speak correctly. For a native speaker of English, this is very cumbersome, because no exact equivalents of these endings exist in English. On the other hand, Russian learners of English struggle with using the articles (“a,” “an,” and “the”), which simply do not exist in Russian. Also, Russian is phonetically close to some European languages (Italian, Spanish), but is very different from English: Any Hollywood movie depicting Russian mobsters makes this “pRetty cleaR” (with a rolling “R”). Italians who come to Russia have a very slight accent in their Russian, but all Russians who come to North America are instantly recognizable by their strong accents in English.

The Russian language has produced one of the greatest literatures in the world, with many excellent writers and poets. This literature continues to generate interest in the Russian language worldwide. In addition, the Russian language emerged as one of the languages of international communication in space exploration, chess, several scientific fields, and politics in the second half of the 20th century, because of the Soviet achievements in those fields. Russian is one of only six official working languages at the United Nations, along with English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Although Russia's political clout has greatly weakened since the end of the Cold War, it remains a strategic language for U.S. intelligence, along with Chinese, Persian, Arabic, and Hindi. George Weber (1997) has listed Russian as the fourth most influential language in the world after English, French, and Spanish, and just ahead of Arabic, Chinese, and German. His system rates languages according to the number of native speakers, secondary speakers, number of countries where the language is used, number of areas of human activity in which the language is used, the main country's economic power, and social/literary prestige.

As in English, there are dialects in the Russian language. Most of the country now speaks a fairly uniform language, as can be heard on Russian TV. The greatest linguistic diversity within Russian is found in the rural areas in the old European part. The southern dialects have a soft “Gh” sound, commonly heard in the 1990s from Mikhail Gorbachev, who grew up in the Stavropol region. The northerners say the hard “G” instead. The Ivanovo and Vologda regions of Russia are notorious for their unstressed “O,” pronounced as “O,” not “Ah.” The Ryazan region turns “Ahs” into “Yahs.” Moscovites tend to overemphasize “A” at the expense of “O” in unstressed positions—something that people from “B(ah)ston” do in the United States.

Before the advent of TV and jet travel, the vocabulary varied tremendously from region to region. Vladimir Dal composed a famous dictionary of the Russian language in the late 1800s, with 250,000 words in four volumes. Much of the dictionary consisted of regionalisms—words that were only used in a few places and are now lost. Only 20,000–30,000 of those words are probably used today. For instance, bulka in Moscow means “sweet roll,” but in St. Petersburg it denotes “white bread” as opposed to “rye bread.”

Slang and Modern Influences in Russian Russian street slang is extensive. The use of expletives is unfortunately very common; they can be heard everywhere—in the streets, on TV, and even in the Duma's parliamentary proceedings! Much of the offensive vocabulary comes from the prison slang perpetrated in the Soviet GULAG. Not only the patently taboo words (such as mat, derived from the word for “mother”), but even common, slightly off-color phrases like mochit v sortire (“drown [terrorists] in a toilet,” popularized by President Putin during the second Chechen campaign), come straight from the street language. About 10 words in Russian are customarily “bleeped out” on TV; 4 of them are considered particularly bad. Their origin is obscure. A popular legend suggests that the words were borrowed from the Tatar invaders in the 13th–15th centuries, though no serious scholar has ever supported such a claim. A more realistic idea is that such originally meaningful Russian words describing human parts and relations were used in sacred spells during the spring seeding season, and later became the swear words in low usage.

Thousands of Russian words are obsolete. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a heroic effort to bring some of these back from oblivion in his Dictionary of Extended Russian Language, with over 5,000 entries. His own prose was greatly enriched by these, but in the modern age of rapid online communications the trend is toward fewer and simpler words. Of course, there are hundreds of new words in Russian that have been borrowed straight from English, especially in the computer and business worlds. Some of these words (scanner, Internet, flashka) did not exist before, and their borrowed use is justified. Some perfectly reasonable old Russian terms, however, have been jettisoned in favor of the trendy new ones; for example, no one in the business community in Russia today would want to work in a kontora (itself a foreign word based on “counter”), but rather in an office.

The Russian Language Abroad

Russian is a global language. In the Russian Federation, 20% of the population belong to 1 of 182 non-Russian ethnicities, but all of these people are semifluent to fluent in Russian as well. In addition, Russian is spoken by most people in the other FSU republics who grew up during the Soviet period, and by Russians who live abroad. In the FSU today, the lowest proportions of non-native Russian speakers are observed in the Baltics, where the young generation has been lured to study English since independence was achieved. However, even there more than half of non-Russian adults are able to communicate in Russian, although not everyone would admit it. It is easier to use Russian in Latvia and Lithuania than in Estonia. About 30% of Estonia's population is Russian, but most ethnic Estonians would much prefer to use English to communicate with foreigners. Paradoxically, the young people in Estonia now are actually more likely to study Russian than their peers in the other republics. Nevertheless, older people will definitely have a higher degree of proficiency in it than the generation born after 1991.

In Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, virtually everyone can still understand Russian, but there are an estimated 8 million Ukrainians who are not able to speak Russian. In Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia, most people over the age of 20 can speak some Russian; in Kazakhstan, some urban Kazakhs will even speak Russian better than the Kazakh language. In Georgia, however, proficiency in Russian is rapidly dropping. A recent study by the Russian Academy of Sciences (Berkutova et al., 2007) estimated that about 1 million Georgians today (20%) have no proficiency in Russian. Most of these grew up in the post-Soviet period.

Russian language and culture extend around the globe. Four waves of Russian emigration have scattered millions of Russian speakers abroad. The first wave began before World War I and lasted until after the Revolution of 1917; the second took place after World War II; the third consisted of Jewish and other religious groups' emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s; and the fourth has consisted of professional emigration since the fall of the Soviet Union. The first was the most extensive wave, numbering in the millions. In the first two waves, hundreds of thousands went to Europe, although many also ended up in Canada, the United States, China, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and New Zealand. Not all of those Russian speakers were ethnic Russians; Ukrainians and Jewish emigrants were usually bilingual and were sometimes classified as “Russians” abroad. In the third wave, the majority went to Israel, but many also went to the United States, Canada, Germany, and France (de Tinguy, 2004).

The fourth wave has produced about 1.4 million emigrants, the majority of whom have ended up in just three countries: Israel, Germany, and the United States. The United States has received about 650,000 to date, including 16,000 athletes; 4,000 actors; and thousands of computer programmers, mathematicians, engineers, and scientists. Russian mathematicians and physicists now account for about 3–4% of the total numbers in their respective professions in the United States. Unlike the other three waves, the last wave contained primarily professional emigrants with a good knowledge of foreign languages and excellent employment prospects. Some were ethnic German and Jewish migrants, but quite a few were Russian and Ukrainian. They greatly enriched the countries they migrated to, but also caused concerns about “brain drain” back home. Effectively, the university education given to these people in the Soviet Union for free has been imported by the advanced Western economies. However, unlike those in the previous waves, the most recent emigrants remain connected to home; most travel back at least once per year and collaborate with their peers left behind. The United States received about 13,000 new permanent residents from Russia in 2006, and an even higher number from Ukraine, 17,000 (a much higher proportion than Russia's, considering its smaller population). If Ukraine and Russia were combined, they would represent the eighth largest source of immigrants into the United States in 2006, after Mexico, China, the Philippines, India, Cuba, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic.

In the United States, large communities of Russian speakers (including, importantly, Soviet-period Jews, some Ukrainians, Germans of Russian descent, and others for whom Russian is the first language, but who are not ethnically Russian) exist in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Portland, Miami, Houston, Minneapolis, and other large metropolitan areas (Hardwick, 2007). Many of these communities have thriving Russian grocery stores, pharmacies, restaurants, bookstores, nursing homes, real estate offices, car dealerships, theaters, schools, newspapers, and radio/TV stations. The total number of persons age 5 and older speaking Russian at home, according to the 2000 U.S. census, was a little over 706,000. In 1990 there were only 241,000 such speakers; the difference highlights the surge of Russian immigration after the end of the Cold War. It allows us to estimate the total influx in these 10 years at about half a million. Today Russian has become the 10th most common language in the United States, after English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Italian, and Korean.

Outside the United States, particularly large Russian communities exist in Israel (750,000), Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Argentina, roughly in this order. Whereas France attracted a lot of refugees after the two world wars, and Israel and Germany drew a million Soviet Jews in the 1980s and 1990s, today the United Kingdom has become the biggest magnet for rich and/or professional Russians in Europe. One reason is simple: It is the only major European Union (EU) country that uses English, the main foreign language studied by the Russians. Moreover, U.K. admission policies encourage the immigration of rich and educated people. The traditional magnets, Canada and the United States, also lose out because of the geographic distance: It takes only 3? hours to get from London to Moscow by plane, but over 10 from New York or Toronto, which is an important consideration for the jet-dependent business elite. The new immigrants make regular trips back home for business or family reasons. Finally, after September 11, 2001, new visa and immigration policies have discouraged access to the United States; the job market there has also been lackluster, resulting in a steady drop in the immigrant flow over the past 5 years.

Other Indo-European Languages: Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldovan, Armenian, and Tajik

Latvian and Lithuanian are two existing Baltic languages. The Old Prussian language was spoken 500 years ago in what is today northeastern Poland, but is now extinct. The Baltic languages are ancient and complex. Their vocabulary and grammar places them somewhere between Germanic and Slavic languages. As noted earlier, Lithuanians claim that their language has much in common with Sanskrit, the old Indian language that appears to be the closest to the presumed Indo-European mother tongue. The Baltic languages are written in the Latin alphabet. Although both Latvia and Lithuania are anxious to preserve their languages, the geographic reality is such that most young people are learning at least English as the language of international communication, and perhaps German or French to open up farther opportunities within the EU. Many Russian speakers also live in these two countries, interspersed among the locals (7% in Lithuania, about 30% in Latvia); in addition, much business and trade are now done with Russia and Poland, and to a lesser extent with Ukraine and Belarus, thus necessitating at least some knowledge of Russian and/or Polish for business purposes.

Moldova speaks the Moldovan language, which is a northern dialect of Romanian, an Indo-European language of the Romance branch. Until recently, the Moldovan language used Cyrillic script, but it is now Latinized to conform to Romanian. With about 10% Slavic and 90% Latin roots, Moldovan has a vocabulary that is easy for other Romance-speaking peoples of Europe (French, Italians, etc.) to learn. However, its grammar is rather complex, owing in part to borrowings from the surrounding Slavic languages. If you have ever wondered why people in this part of the world would speak a Latin-derived language, look at the historical maps showing the eastern Roman Empire in about 400 A.D., and you will understand. The Romanians are descendants of the indigenous Wallachians, who became culturally Romanized.

The Armenian language is in its own separate group and has a unique alphabet. The culture and language of Armenia are very old, dating back more than a thousand years. According to local legends, Armenia was supposedly the place where the original Garden of Eden was located, as well as the site where Noah's Ark landed (Mt. Ararat in modern-day Turkey). There are some parallels between the Armenian and the Greek languages. Due to its proximity to Iran, the Armenian language was influenced by Persian (also known as Farsi). Although Armenian is a distinct language, it still has some words that speakers of Indo-European languages would recognize. For example, “cow” is kav (korova in Russian), while “daughter” is dostr (doch in Russian). Besides the Jews and the Roma, the Armenians are easily the most widespread people internationally today, with twice as many Armenians living abroad as in Armenia proper. California alone had 78,000 Armenians in 2000. There are about 300,000 Armenians in the United States (look up local listings in your city; their last names typically end with “-ian”). More than 3 million live worldwide in places as diverse and distant as Israel, Argentina, Brazil, France, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Australia.

The Tajik language is also Indo-European, belonging to the Iranian branch and thus related to Persian/Farsi. It is the only main language of Indo-European origin in the five “-stans” of the former Soviet Central Asia. To the south of Tajikistan, however, the Pashtu and Urdu people of Afghanistan and Pakistan speak related languages, with Farsi-speaking Iran being also not too far away. In the northern Caucasus, Ossetian is a related Iranian language spoken by a few hundred thousand Ossetians, who claim to be descendants of the ancient Scythians.

Altaic Languages

The second largest language family by numbers of speakers in the FSU is the Altaic family. With about 66 languages, it is almost as large and as diverse as the Indo-European family. Its origins are believed to be in the Altay Mountains of Siberia. Today this region still has the ethnic Altaytsy, who resemble Mongolians in appearance and speak an Altaic language. The largest branch within the family is Turkic. Languages in this group spoken inside Russia include Tatar, Bashkir, Karachay-Balkar, Chuvash, Yakut, Tuvin, Altay, and a few others. In the broader FSU, there are also Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak, Uzbek, Gagauz, and a few others. Other important languages from this family are those of the Tungusic branch, spoken by the Evens and the Evenks of northern Siberia, and by the Nanay and Udege of the Russian Pacific. The Mongolian branch is represented in Russia by the Buryat language spoken near Lake Baikal, and by the Kalmyk language spoken north of the Caspian Sea. Outside the FSU, the Korean and Japanese languages are sometimes also included in this family, although this inclusion is debatable (Starostin et al., 2003).

Like the Indo-Europeans, the Altaic people in all probability share a history. They are likely to have originated somewhere near the geographic center of Eurasia in the Mesolithic Age. They probably then spread away from the Altay and other Central Asian mountains to the north and west in waves of successful migrations about 8000 to 6000 B.C., bringing in important technologies (e.g., the bow and arrow) and domesticating hunting dogs. Some Altaic groups today are more Asian in their physical appearance, while others are more European. Certainly they represent a mixture of Asian and European groups. Although the Altaic people may have originated in the mountains, today their languages are more common in distinctively steppe-based cultures formed around a nomadic lifestyle and traditionally dependent on horses and sheep.

The Altaic languages share some common words, including roots for some numerals and most common things. Within the Turkic branch many words may be virtually identical. For example, “mountain” is tau or tay; “lake” is kol or kul; “water” is su; and so on. In the Middle Ages, many of the Turkic cultures came into contact with Islam, and the Arabic language and script were introduced via Persian and Tajik scholars. Therefore, the most common greeting in these languages today is not a Turkic phrase, but some variant of the Arabic Salam aleykum, meaning “Peace be unto you.”

The Turkic languages are the largest branch of the Altaic family, numbering about 30. They played an important role historically because they were used by the Tatar–Mongol invaders during the Middle Ages. Today they are mainly shared by civilizations shaped by farming (Uzbekistan, Turkey), but were originally languages of the nomads. Many are mutually intelligible, at least with some basic study (e.g., Kyrgyz and Kazakh, or Azeri and Turkic). The Turkic languages can be subdivided into the southwestern Oghuz group, which includes Turkic, Azeri, and Turkmen; the northwestern group (Kipchak), which includes Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, and Bashkir; the northeastern group of Yakut-related Siberian languages; and the southeastern group, with Uzbek being most prominent.

Many Altaic languages had no writing systems until the late 19th or even the early 20th century, and a few remain spoken-only languages today (e.g., Gagauz in Moldova). During the Soviet period, most written Turkic languages were converted from Arabic to Latin script on Lenin's orders, and later to Cyrillic under Stalin. When users of Tatar, Uzbek, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, the languages of the northern Caucasian peoples, Buryat, and Kalmyk were all required to make Cyrillic the basis for their alphabets, new letters had to be added for sounds that do not occur in Russian. Why was this conversion ordered? First, it was important to the Soviet authorities for people to be unable to read documents written in the pre-Soviet era. A way to do this was to change their alphabets, thereby making old documents unreadable by young people. It also facilitated the cultural Sovietization of these cultures, because new Marxist and scientific terminology borrowed from Russian could now be introduced. At the same time, some Persian and Arabic words were replaced with Russian equivalents. Today Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and the Turkic languages in Russia continue to use Cyrillic, whereas the Azeri and Turkmen languages have been converted to the Latin alphabet to facilitate economic and political integration with Latinized Turkey and the broader world. This, of course, may now lead to the cultural exclusion of older people who can no longer read the newspapers.

The most amazing, and perhaps extreme, example of a writing system's transformation involved the Uzbek language. Before 1928, written Uzbek used Arabic script borrowed from Muslim Arab scholars during the Middle Ages. The new Uzbek language was written, taught, and enforced in Latin script from 1928 until the enforced switch to Cyrillic in 1940. Between 1940 and 1992, Uzbek was written primarily in Cyrillic, but the newly independent Uzbekistan officially reintroduced Latin script in 1992. Nevertheless, old traditions die hard, and Cyrillic still continues to be widely used. Currency, street signs, educational programs, and governmental communications are being gradually switched to Latin script, however. Although it may seem practical in our increasingly globalized world to use the most widespread alphabet, it also clearly reflects the political orientation of the Uzbek leadership in recent years away from Russia and toward Europe, Turkey, and the United States.

Who Are the Tatars?

Anyone who likes the history of Russia is fascinated by the Tatars. The name stood for different groups of people at different periods in history, actually. The Tatars were known to the Western Europeans during the Middle Ages as “Tartars,” based on the belief that they came straight from the underworld (Tartarus, in Greek mythology). The various groups of Altaic people of the Turkic branch came to be known as Tatars over centuries, beginning as early as 500 A.D. It must be stressed that since their participation in the Tatar–Mongol occupation of Rus in the 13th–15th centuries, the Tatars had undergone big changes with respect to their lifestyle, language, and customs. The Tatars adopted Islam and mixed in with many tribes that they encountered farther west. In Russia today the Tatars are the second largest ethnic group after the Russians, numbering over 6 million people. They live primarily in three areas: Tatarstan in the middle Volga, Astrakhan near the Caspian Sea, and parts of western Siberia. The Bashkirs are closely related to the Tatars. Other Turkic speakers living nearby are the Chuvash, formerly known as the Bolgars. They are distantly related to the Bulgarians in Moldova and Bulgaria; both groups have mixed Slavic and Turkic ancestry, with some Uralic influences as well. Also significant are the Crimean Tatars in Ukraine. The majority of Tatars today profess Islam, but the Chuvash are Orthodox Christians.

The Mongolian Connection

A few peoples in Russia speak languages that are related to the Mongolian or Manchu languages of northeastern China. These are the Buryats, who live near the Mongolian border around Lake Baikal, and also the Kalmyks of the north Caspian steppe. Like true Mongolians, they historically depended on horses, lived in movable yurts, and led a nomadic pastoral lifestyle. Most lead a settled life today. The Buryats in particular have adapted very well to the cold Siberian conditions by learning agriculture and cattle ranching from the Russian settlers, while continuing with fishing and hunting to supplement the ranching.

The Evens and the Evenks are closely related groups living throughout eastern Siberia. They are taiga hunters and fishermen, who travel hundreds of kilometers on sleighs pulled by reindeer or dogs. They survive in the least hospitable climates on earth, including the upper Yana basin, where winter temperatures routinely plunge below –50°C. If an Even(k) child is born in winter, he or she receives a first bath in … snow. The Evenks tend to live along the Yenisei and in taiga north of the Amur River, while the Evens live in small communities farther north and east in the Lena and Indigirka basins.

Uralic Languages

As the name suggests, the Uralic languages originated somewhere near the Ural Mountains. Today these languages are spoken as far south and west as Hungary, and as far north and east as the Lena River delta by the Yukaghir people, but also in Finland and Estonia; in the Karelia, Mordovia, Udmurtiya, Mari El, and Komi Republics of Russia; and in a few places in western Siberia and along the Arctic Ocean's shores. There are about 20 million Uralic speakers worldwide, with perhaps 4 million in Russia. In contrast with the steppe- and mountain-based Altaic speakers discussed above, the Uralic speakers are peoples of the forests, river banks, and seacoasts. Note that in many older textbooks and atlases the Uralic languages are still placed in the same family as the Altaic in a joint Altaic–Uralic family; however, linguists have not considered this correct for over 50 years now.

The Uralic languages have a very complicated grammar, with many cases for nouns in particular. In some dialects of Komi, there may be 27 cases; in Estonian, 14; in Mordvinian, 13; and so on. In comparison, Russian has only 6 and German 4, while French and English have none. The Uralic languages, however, do not have gendered nouns—or, curiously, the verb “to have.” They also commonly have negative verbs (i.e., a verb form that combines “no” as a suffix with the verb stem, as in the English “don't”). J. R. R. Tolkien was so taken in with the beauty and the unusual grammar of the Finnish language that he based his invented Quenya tongue in The Lord of the Rings on it.

Because Uralic languages are so difficult for outsiders to learn, and because their native speakers are few in number and are scattered across vast northern forests, the future of many of these languages is currently in question. These people were assimilated much earlier and more thoroughly than the Altaic people, and thus they tend to speak Russian as their first language now. Of the approximately 25 such languages spoken in Russia, 13 are endangered. For example, the Saami of the Kola Peninsula, also called the Lapps in northern Norway, number fewer than 2,000. About 70,000 live in Finland and Norway, so the overall group is unlikely to go extinct soon, but the Kola dialects are dying out. Incidentally, these are the people who gave the world the word “tundra” and (along with others) domesticated reindeer. It would be a great tragedy if their language and culture completely disappeared. There are a few other Uralic languages in Russia with only a few hundred speakers.

The Komi people have lived with the Russians the longest—about 600 years, in the Pechora River basin. Novgorod merchants traded with them and provided needed technology in the early stages of the settlement of the Russian north. Their region of northeastern European Russia was the first place where nonferrous metals began to be mined in the Russian Empire. Coal mines and the military provide much employment to them now.

The Karelians live along the Finnish border. Their language is only spoken, not written, and does closely resemble Finnish. The Estonians likewise live close to Finland (across the Baltic Sea) and have a similar language. Other large groups of the related Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic people live in the basin of the Volga and have their own republics within Russia—Udmurtiya, Mari El, and Mordovia (two ethnic groups). Most are heavily Russianized. Unlike most of the Turkic people considered above, the Uralic people were converted to Orthodox Christianity in the 15th and 16th centuries, which facilitated their acculturation.

The shores of the Arctic Ocean in the European part of Russia are settled by the Nenets people. You may have heard of the Samoyed dog. Samoyed literally means “self-eating” and was a derogatory name that the early Russian settlers used to designate the Nenets population, because they incorrectly believed that the Nenets were cannibalistic savages. Like the closely related Saami of the Kola Peninsula, these people domesticated reindeer and practiced subsistence hunting, fishing, and berry gathering in the tundra.

The lower Ob basin in western Siberia is settled by the Khanty and the Mansy, two closely related peoples of the Uralic group. These are true forest dwellers dependent on forest game hunting and fishing. As is typical of the Uralic peoples, they are small in stature and have dark hair, but light-colored eyes. There is an opinion that these people are the last remaining representatives of the formerly mighty people Sybir, who gave Siberia its name. They may be also related to the Huns, who helped destroy the Roman Empire and contributed to the Magyars of Hungary.

On the frozen shores of the East Siberian Sea, a few hundred Yukaghir (“ice people”) survive as a remnant of a more widespread, apparently indigenous Uralic tribe that went farthest east of its original home in the Urals. However, some sources suggest that they are more closely related to the Chukchi people, who speak a Paleoasiatic language, and are not Uralic at all.

Estonian is a Uralic language closely related to Finnish. The economic openness of Estonia and its desire to attract foreign investment have made it the most English-speaking of any FSU republic—much more so than neighboring Latvia and Lithuania. German is also widely studied. However, the influx of Russian tourists and businessmen and the continued presence of Russian speakers ensure that Russian will remain understood. Over 58% of Estonian children studied Russian in school in 2006, although only 30% spoke Russian at home.

Other Languages

The Caucasus is a melting pot of languages and cultures. Some languages spoken in the region today are from the Indo-European family (Russian, Ossetian, Armenian) or the Altaic family (Karachay-Balkar, Kalmyk). Most, however, belong to the distinct and indigenous Caucasian family. The Georgian (Kartli), Vainakh (Chechen and Ingush), and Circassian languages are worth mentioning here.

Georgians (their name for themselves is Kartli) are ancient inhabitants of the Caucasus Mountains' south slope; they number only 4 million, with a deep traditional culture. Their language has a distinct alphabet. The Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan people have related languages inside Georgia. The Georgian alphabet, called Mkhedruli, is over 1,000 years old and has 38 letters. The letters follow the order of those in the Greek alphabet, but they are highly unique in style. Curiously, only uppercase letters are used. The Ossetian and Abkhaz people sometimes used it in the past for their languages. The reading is straightforward, with both consonants and vowels spelled out, and is done from left to right. Unlike the nearby Armenians, few Georgians live abroad. One of the distinctions of the Georgian language is that many consonants are frequently grouped together, which makes it difficult for foreign learners to pronounce.

Other indigenous inhabitants of the Caucasus are the Circassians (Kabardins, true Circassians, Adygs, Abkhaz) and the Vainakhs (Chechens and Ingush). They live primarily on the northern slopes of the mountains. The Circassian culture is originally steppe-based and in many ways resembles that of the Altaic people; however, their language is not Altaic. Their main occupation has been sheep and horse ranching, along with some agriculture. The Abkhaz people of the disputed separatist republic are related to the Circassians on the north slope of the Caucasus in Russia and are unrelated to Georgians. They use the Cyrillic alphabet. According to one hypothesis, Circassians may be the closest living relatives of the Basque people in Spain. The Vainakhs are typically mountain dwellers, living high up river valleys near the snow-capped peaks. Historically, they were hunters and warriors. The Dagestan Republic of Russia has over 30 somewhat related languages, and is the most linguistically diverse part of Russia today. The main groups there are the Avars, the Lezghins, the Dargins, and the Lakhs. Many Lezghins live farther south inside Azerbaijan as well. The languages of Dagestan are hard to classify into a specific family or language group, but are apparently indigenous to the Caucasus.

In the extreme Far East of Russia, in Kamchatka and Chukotka, small groups of Paleoasian people speak ancient and complex languages that are related to the languages of Native Americans. These groups are the Chukchi, the Koryaks, the Itelmens, the Inuit (Eskimo), and the Aleuts.