1/21/2024 0 Comments Warren vogel russian linguist ohioSixty years after every other Russian city in Alaska had switched to English, Ninilchik villagers were keeping records with the Julian calendar and speaking only Ninilchik Russian. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has declared 2019 the year of the indigenous language, which linguists hope will lead to more interest - and funding - for chronicling more obscure dialects before they go extinct. The dictionary project suggests a roadmap for seizing the growing local and international interest in recording vanishing cultural heritages. Half of the 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to disappear sometime this century. Every two weeks, a language vanishes without being recorded. Without this intervention, odds are that Ninilchik Russian - which was never written down - would have been lost to history. The final version of the decades-long project will be released at the end of 2019. Joining forces with others from Ninilchik, he worked with two Russian linguists and a cultural anthropologist to help compile a written and audio Ninilchik Russian dictionary. So he embarked on a quest to preserve the vanishing language. Leman, now 69, didn’t want this heritage to vanish from village memory. Today, everyone in the village of Ninilchik speaks English. Only a few native Ninilchik Russian speakers remain, all of them over 85. He was aware it was a powerful moment, but he had no idea how significant his father’s small act of intimacy was in his family’s long, fraught history with the language. Leman first learned of her request from a relative, many years after that hospital visit. She had seen her son’s generation punished by Americans for speaking Ninilchik Russian, and didn’t want the same fate to befall her grandchildren. The language survived the sale of Alaska to America in 1867 because Ninilchik was isolated from outsiders and ignored by American authorities.īut Wayne Leman’s grandmother told her children to stop speaking her native tongue to her in 1959, the year Alaska became a U.S. It was tender but powerful, cutting through everything else in the room.įor almost a century, Ninilchik Russian was the dominant language spoken in Ninilchik, the village where generations of the Leman family grew up, along a mile of isolated coastline in south central Alaska. Leman doesn’t know what his father said to his grandmother - like the rest of his generation, he was never taught the language - but he remembers the tone of his father’s voice. It was 1984, and they were visiting Leman’s grandmother in the hospital. Wayne Leman remembers the first time he heard his father disregard a decades-old family agreement not to speak Ninilchik Russian.
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