Global Friday, Polar Days and Northern Studies presents
Dr. Jenanne Ferguson - Associate Professor
Anthropology, Economics and Political Science - MacEwan University

The City as a New Language Stronghold? Sakha Language Practices in Yakutsk in the 2020s

Abstract: This talk examines the shifting concerns speakers have regarding language maintenance and language practices for Sakha (an indigenous North Siberian Turkic language) in urban space of Yakutsk, in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). Yakutsk is one of the fastest-growing cities in Siberia and the Far East, populated by not only ethnic Sakha and members of other indigenous ethnicities from the region but by newcomers migrating from other parts of Russia and Central Asia. Considering research conducted with Sakha-language speakers over the last decade and a half, I focus in on current trends by which Sakha language is currently being made visible and audible in the city’s public spaces, highlighting the linguistic landscape as well as the youth alternative music sphere. While in many ways the city presents a linguistic ecology in which an indigenous language is thriving, we must also consider the impacts of recent federal policy and planning on languages other than Russian, and the ways in which the other languages indigenous to the Republic (Even, Evenki, Dolgan, Yukaghir, and Chukchi) are often erased completely from urban spaces.

Speaker Bio: Jenanne Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, Economics and Political Science at MacEwan University. As a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, her work primarily focuses on the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous and minoritized languages in the Circumpolar North (specifically the Sakha Republic); she is currently expanding her research into more southerly parts of Canada along with former Soviet spaces. She has particular interests in language use in urban spaces, linguistic landscapes, verbal art and music, language and ecology, as well as language policy and language rights. She is the author of Words Like Birds: Sakha Language Discourses and Practices in the City (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) and is a co-editor of The Siberian World (Routledge, 2023). 
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