1st Edition

Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia

By Laura Siragusa Copyright 2018
272 Pages
by Routledge

272 Pages 53 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This volume illustrates how language revival movements in Russia and elsewhere have often followed a specific pattern of literacy bias in the promotion of a minority’s heritage language, partly neglecting the social and relational aspects of orality. Using the Vepsian Renaissance as an example, this volume brings to the surface a literacy-orality dualism new to the discussion around revival... Read more

Chapter 1. Introduction: revival of a heritage language. A question of literacy and orality





Chapter 2. Vepsian representations and language in history





Chapter 3. Multilingual Russia: superdiversity meets language revival





Chapter 4. Revaluation of language: field work as a give-and-take phenomenon





Chapter 5. Metaphors of language: independent entity vs. experience of life





Chapter 6. A way to make sense of the world using dialects in villages





Chapter 7. Vepsän kel’ and the city





Chapter 8. Education and the babushka





Conclusion. Revitalizing a heritage language. Towards multimodality and "multispatiality"

Biography

Laura Siragusa is a linguistic anthropology working within a program on Indigenous Studies at the University of Helsinki. She has co-edited a special issue on Language Sustainability for the Journal Anthropologica, and published miscellaneous articles on Vepsian matters in Sibirica, JEFUL, and Folklore.