Code Switching and Pidgin: Where Does One Draw the Line?

Code switching is a topic within linguistics which has always fascinated me. Perhaps this is because it is arguably the linguistic topic discussed in this class which I can most readily see in my life. My father is a native English and French speaker. His parents immigrated to the United States before he was born, and early on in life they had relatively poor command over the English Language. Throughout childhood and into the present day, my father always speaks to his family in a mixture of French and of English. My Grandparents will say something to my father in French, only for him to respond in English with some French words mixed in. He might then say something in French with his parents responding back to him in English. It's a very interesting concept and one which I have also been exposed to in one of my friends' households. 

My friend Matan immigrated with his family to the United States, from Israel, when he was 7 or 8. His mother is from Reunion Island, a French colony, and his father was born and raised in Israel. At home, Matan and his family speak in a perplexing mish-mash of Hebrew, English, and French, with individual sentences containing features of all three languages. Surely you can imagine that this combination of languages is very strange to listen to. 

Additionally, growing up in Southern California I’ve been exposed to a great deal of spanish on a near daily basis. Though I’ve never formally studied Spanish, I find that my speech, and the speech of many people around me, borrows loan words from Spanish on a fairly regular basis. For example I might great a friend using “Hola” or say goodbye using “adios” or I might say “Menana” when referring to tomorrow and so on. This type of code switching is less intense, for lack of a better term, then the other forms I mentioned prior but it is code-switching nevertheless.

But perhaps the most intense form of code switching I personally experience on a day to day basis is that which I use at my job at Good Choice Sushi. Most of the staff at my restaurant is either Japanese or Hispanic, with some of the servers being standard English-speaking Americans such as myself. With many of my co-workers having worked in the restaurant for a very long time, many of the Japanese staff speak perfect Spanish and many of the Hispanic staff can use a surprising amount of Japanese. Therefore, in the workplace, there is an incredible mix between Spanish, Japanese, and English. Generally speaking, at its core, conversation is held in English but with very frequent Spanish and Japanese phrases or loan words. For example, when referring to a bill we generally either call it the “Oaiso” (the Japanese equivalent). When ordered to tell the chef to prepare more tempura shrimp, we will often send an order to the back requesting “mas camarones por favor.” These examples might appear small, but these are only examples which I can recall. Many of my co-workers communicate in really good Spengapanese, using a lot of features from japanese and Spanish in their speech rather than relying as much on the English as I do. To me, this begs the question of whether or not this is actually code switching. What begs this question is the regularity of borrowed vocabulary in their speech, with them using the same words for the same things (for example, they generally don’t alternate between camarones and shrimp but rather they regularly only use camarones). Perhaps this example isn’t code switching. Perhaps it is rather the development of a Pidgin language. And frankly, where does one draw the distinction?

Russianness in the Post-Soviet Block

This year, I decided to study the Russian Language. I have always been, at the very least, marginally interested in Russian society and Russian culture, I find the language to be beautiful sounding, and I found its features to be sufficiently complex (and interesting). But one of the reasons I decided to study Russian was because of how polarizing the language is in large parts of the Earth today. The Russian Language is polarizing in North America because of the aftereffects of the Cold War, and because of recent allegations of Russian collusion in North American elections; the Russian Language is polarizing in Western Europe because of the influence of Russian oil and of Russian oligarchs in places like London or Berlin, and the Russian Language is polarizing in Eastern Europe because of the lasting legacy of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe, and most recently because of the annexation of the Crimean Penninsula in 2014.

The history of Crimea is long and complex. The Penninsula has exchanged hands between Greeks, Italians, Tartars (Turkic nomads), and Slavs (of Russian and of Ukrainian stock) countless times throughout history. The Russian empire incorporated Crimea after a war with the Turkish Ottoman Empire, after which the demographics of the peninsula would shift to Russian after decades of resettlement. The Russian Black Sea fleet was based out of Crimea, and Crimea became a place as Russian as any other part of Russia. Then, things changed, when under Soviet control the Crimean Penninsula was given to the Ukrainian SSR as a gift to celebrate 400 years of Ukrainian incorporation within Russia; this move was intended to be purely ceremonial and no one foresaw that in a few short decades the Soviet Union would collapse and Crimea would join a freshly independent Ukraine.

Despite joining Ukraine, Crimea and the rest of Eastern Ukraine remains predominately Russian. Russian is spoken as the native language of the vast majority of Crimeans and Eastern Ukrainians, therefore many of them choose to identify with the nationality tied to their language rather than the nationality tied to their nation. This is what essentially gave Vladimir Putin the confidence to annex the Crimean Penninsula, and to start a civil war between East and West within Ukraine, because he knew that the Crimean people wouldn't resist Russian expansion into their country.

Anecdotally speaking, I have more evidence to back this up. Yulia Belopolsky, my Russian professor, is from Crimea and affectionally reflects upon the annexation of Crimea as the time when Crimea "returned to Russia." Additionally, my Russian history Professor last year reflected on his friends' experience in 2014 when they were visiting Kazakhstan and heard people marching through the streets yelling, "Crimea is ours!" as the news spread that Russia had annexed Crimea. This offers some interesting insight as to how the post-soviet block views itself in relation to Russia. A lot of people, it would seem, in post-soviet countries across Eurasia still feel a close affinity to Russian culture and to the Russian language. People still identify with their former Russianness despite having been politically isolated from Russia for decades now, demonstrating the lasting impact language has on how one views themselves. Nationality has a very close relationship with language, and one is likely to identify with the people who are like them and share their language before they group themselves with another group of people with whom they might share a nation but not a language.

Online Language Learning SUCKS!

We have all had a very, very, very busy week or two. A lot of us traveled for Spring Break, and then we were all informed that we would be expected to return home as quickly as possible after our break, due to the hastily spreading Corona Virus (COVID-19). We quickly said goodbye to those friends and colleagues that we could, before being ushered off-campus by our parents. But alas, it gets worse: not only do we miss out on spending time with many of our friends and loved ones, but now we are being told to continue classes digitally from the security of our own homes. Being forced to take online classes is a huge bummer for most students, but it is even worse than it might first seem for those of us who are studying a foreign language.

Learning a foreign language is really hard work, especially when you're just starting. Those of us who decided to start learning a new foreign language this year find ourselves buried in the complexities of grammar, learning pronunciation, learning to read and write, and learning basic vocabulary. The difficulties we experience are compounded by the difficulty in picking up a new foreign language and the difficulty in transitioning to an online environment in which instructor feedback is less in-depth. This is sure to dampen the language learning experience and limit the benefits of learning a new foreign language. Without a doubt, students are going to struggle to keep up with rapidly ongoing new content and with students being scattered across different time zones, students are having to make massive adjustments to ordinary life in order to accommodate for their new schedules. Worst of all, students are losing access to their professors and to each other, decreasing access to practice materials with practices like simple oral or listening drills being much harder to coordinate.

Language learning is by definition not a passive process, it takes a lot of time, motivation, and practice in order to excel. The problem with moving classes online for foreign language students is that it affects how much time you can put in, it can diminish motivation, and it makes practicing much more difficult; it takes an active learning process and makes it pacific. This is dangerous for a foreign language learner, as it makes it much easier to fall behind, the effect of which being that catching back up will only become harder and harder the further behind you fall. It is unfortunate that we have to be put in such a situation, but of course, it goes without saying that we have no other choice given the rate at which COVID-19 is spreading. It is important to stay safe and to stay indoors, despite the difficulties that might pose on your language learning journey, and at the end of the day if you are dedicated and passionate enough about your foreign language of choice the hurtles presented to you today will be easily surmountable.

Language or Dialect? And Whats the Difference?

Just like the rest of us, the creation of my Essay 2 Language Research Paper is well under-way. In my paper, I am looking at different features of different languages in order to better understand what makes certain languages more difficult to learn. One such language I am looking at is the Arabic Language. What makes the Arabic language so notoriously difficult to learn?

There are a number of reasons why Arabic is such a hard language to learn; two of the main reasons I've discovered are the divergent nature of Arabic dialects from one another, and the difficulty non-native speakers face when reading the unstressed vowels in Arabic writing.

When learning Arabic, generally students have to learn the standard variety of Arabic called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA is very distinct from most of the modern dialects of Arabic; it is based on Biblical Arabic whereas the other forms of Arabic are simply based on the Arabic spoken in a given region (the Levant, Egypt, Gulf, North Africa, or Iraq just to name a few places associated with a dialect). The different dialects vary greatly from one another, and from MSA in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, and inflection. This begs the question then, if the different forms of Arabic can vary so greatly from one another, why are they all considered to be the same language instead of different languages?

The dialects of which the modern Arabic language consists all share a common lineage in Quranic Arabic (which is very similar to MSA, which is still used today). This strikes me as being similar to how French, Spanish, and Italian all share a common lineage in Vulgar Latin. French, Spanish, and Italian exist on a linguistic continuum, meaning that speakers of all three languages can understand one another to varying degrees based on natural proximity to one another; this is similar to the relationship between all the different modern dialects of Arabic. The different Romance Languages spoken in Western Europe today share similar vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but as you travel around the areas in which these languages are spoken you can clearly see vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation shift from country to country, or from municipality to municipality; and the same is true with the modern dialects of Arabic. So why are Spanish, French, and Italian considered languages but all the dozens of varieties of Arabic are considered one language? This comes down to the way in which languages are defined by linguistics.

In the field of modern linguistics, there is no one universal, solid definition for what exactly a language is. As in biology with the classifications of Organisms, in linguistics, the dividing lines between languages are totally arbitrary. Something is considered a language because enough people all decide it fits the broad, negotiable criteria suited to define a language. Arabic is considered one language and not several because it is what Arabic speakers, and linguists, have decided to believe. French, Spanish, and Italian are all different languages, again, because it is a commonly held belief. The dividing lines between languages and dialects are totally subjective, and can easily be argued in the present and renovated throughout time.

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When in Rome

Before last weekend, I had been to exactly 25 of the 50 States in the United States of America. Since then, I have been to exactly 27 of the 50 States in the United States of America. 

Last weekend, I went on a canvassing trip with about a dozen of my colleagues at AU through Virginia and North Carolina to Rock Hill, South Carolina. I was beyond excited leading up to the trip, as I have always wanted to explore the South Eastern United States but had never managed to make it much further than Southern Virginia. The night we drove down, my friends and I had a late dinner at Waffle House then went to sleep, only to wake up bright and early so we could start knocking on some doors. The culture shock was, to put it simply, rather evident when speaking with Southerners of mostly African American heritage, living in lower-middle-class neighborhoods. What was shocking to me was how differently people spoke in the South, but what was even more shocking to me still was how differently I spoke in the South.

My speech transitioned a great deal over the course of my trip. After my first couple of hours knocking on doors, I noticed myself greeting others very politely, using words like "Ma'am", "Sir", "Mr.", and "Miss" instead of addressing people by less formal nouns or pronouns. By the end of my first day knocking on doors, I noticed myself throwing the word "y'all" into my speech, and as the weekend progressed I noticed myself slurring my speech in an increasingly Southern fashion. 

This is obviously a form of code-switching, and it connects to a greater theme I have noticed myself falling into when I find myself in a foreign environment. When I was visiting Quebec for a French class trip in 2017, I stayed with a host family and noticed myself—on top of speaking more French—speaking English with a slight Quebecois accent with my host family.

When we are surrounded by people of a different background than us, we choose to try and make ourselves appear more familiar by adopting elements of speech we would not normally put on. This seemed especially apparent while I visited the South, as I feel that I (and fellow Yankees around me) embodied this idea of pronunciational mirroring to a great extent. This same concept can have more permanent implications to a persons speech when the individual is exposed to a foreign pronunciation for an extended period of time. 

My grandfather was born in England in 1945 but then immigrated to Southern California at the age of six. After living in the United States for a few years, he (and his older siblings) quickly lost their English accents. Then, when he was in his late 50s, my grandfather moved to Connecticut and now, after almost two decades, has definitely picked up the very real Connecticut accent. This demonstrates how exposure to a foreign form of a language can quickly cause someone to drop characteristics of their indigenous dialect, either for a short period of time or permanently. 

The Alphabet: An Underrated Blessing from Antiquity

       The concept of an 'Alphabet' is one that we take for granted. Considering the fact that most of the world today uses some form of an alphabet (including languages as distinct as Korean, Russian, Indian, and English), and that there are a lot of different alphabets (such as the Romance, Cyrillic, Greek, and Arabic alphabets), it is easy to ignore the reality of how rare alphabets actually are. Every single alphabet (except the Korean Alphabet) has a common origin within one original alphabet, the Phoenician Alphabet.

      The Phoenician Alphabet was invented by a civilization that occupied what is now Israel, Lebanon, and Syria but happily colonized the rest of the Mediterranean spreading trade as they went. The Phoenicians would come into contact with various other groups, including the Arabs, and Indian people-groups, who would adopt the Phoenician writing system but would adapt it for their languages (This is where we get the Arabic script and the Sanskritic script).

      The Greeks would come into contact with Phoenicians and would adopt their trade partners' writing system, but with some sizable differences. For one, the Greeks would write left to right unlike the Phoenicians, and they would modify some Phoenician characters. Later, the Romans would come into contact with the Greeks, and they would take the Greek alphabet and use it with some minor changes to its characters. This was the birth of the Roman script or the script in which we write today.

       Later, the Greek Byzantines would send missionaries to Eastern Europe and Russia. These missionaries would teach the local Slavs to write, using a modified version of the Greek alphabet suited for Slavic pronunciation, creating a new alphabet called the Cyrillic Alphabet.

       The concept of the alphabet is rare and unnatural, just as was the conception of the wheel, or the sail. The concept of the alphabet is an invention from early civilization that has defined all advancements in western society behind it, becoming a staple in how people in the west understand written language. It is a concept that I, as a college student, am fronted with on a near minutely basis on my laptop, on my phone, and on my professor's smartboard. Words are a necessity of life in the 21st century, and behind them is 5000 years of history dating back to one simple discovery that changed the world.

Romanian: A Linguistic Mish-Mash Like English

My cousin flew into Washington DC this week for a business trip. He brought his wonderful girlfriend with him, and the three of us met up for dinner on Sunday. My Cousin's girlfriend, Diana, is of Romanian heritage; both of her parents left Romania after the overthrow of Romania's Communist Dictator in 1989. She is a heritage speaker of Romanian and I enjoy asking her about Romanian vocabulary. But at dinner on Sunday I got a little bit carried away in my questioning and went a little bit too into detail for her to follow: "How much Slavic influence do you notice in Romanian." She, not having much knowledge of linguistics or a Slavic language responded to me by saying, "None, its a romance language."

What Diana didn't realize is that yes, Romanian is, without doubt, a Romance Language, closely related to Italian, French, and Spanish, but unlike the other three languages which have developed away from Vulgar Latin in contact with one another, Romanian was isolated from the Romance Language Family and has adopted a flair all in its own both by adopting characteristics of the languages it is surrounded by and also by maintaining features of Latin which disappeared in Western Romance Languages. 

For example, Romanian has maintained three noun cases from the Latin grammatical case system. Modern Romanian maintains a dative, vocative, and nominative case whereas all other modern Romance Languages have lost this feature that was present in Latin. Additionally, Romanian maintains three grammatical cases (Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter) just like Latin. Romanian also maintains a large amount of Latin based vocabulary, and here are some examples I was able to find through Google Translate: 

English:       Romanian:      Spanish:      Latin:

Red              Rosu               Roja             Rubrum

House          Casa               Casa             Casa (or Domum)

Hand           Mana              Mano            Manibus

Language    Limba            Lengua          Lingua

Although Romanian maintains a lot of features from its Romance roots, there is also a great deal of borrowed vocabulary from the Slavic Languages which nearly surround Romania with Romanian. The word for 'yes' in Romanian is 'da' as it is in Russian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, and Polish. The Romanian word for 'car' is 'mashina' just as it is in Russian and the Romanian word for 'coat' is 'palt' which is rather similar to the Russian word 'Palto.' A lot of Romanians most sophisticated vocabulary stems from a Slavic source, insinuating the elevated status that speakers of Slavic languages must have had over Romanian speakers. In fact, the cross between Slavic and Romance features in Romanian is very reminiscent of English, a Germanic language that has adopted a lot of its sophisticated vocabulary from a Latin (French) source. It also reminds me of Russian, a language that has plenty of French and German influences on its sophisticated vocabulary. 

Evidently, Romania has borrowed a lot from its Slavic neighbors, making Romanian a very interesting cross between two the Europes most prominent language families. It is a perfect example of how languages can change over time based on contact with other groups of people.

Dialects, Dialects, Dialects

The United States is a nation of immigrants. Although some people in the United States have heritage in the US for generations, others have much newer ancestry from recent immigration. My family heritage falls somewhere in between. My father was the first generation of his family born in the United States. His parents were from Drummondville, Quebec, and his two sisters were also born in Quebec Province.

My grandparents and my two aunts all speak French as their first language. In fact, when they all immigrated to Southern California in the early 1960s they spoke no English, but slowly my family learned to speak English, and then my father was born. Unlike his sisters, my father didn't grow up speaking French by itself but instead learned to speak both French and English, together, in a form of Frenglish. My dad is, of course, fluent in English, and he is perfectly proficient in Canadian French as well, but sadly he never taught me any of the French he knows.

That being said, I still learned a deal of French while studying it in Highschool. I might not have perfect French, but I never had any difficulty understanding the French my teacher spoke or the French spoken in the French language audio recordings we used in class. That being said, when my father or my grandparents try to speak with me in French I often struggle to understand even simple phrases. But how could this be? I was taught French, and my family can speak French.

The difference stems from a difference in dialect. I was schooled in Metropolitan (or Parisian) French, whereas my family, obviously, doesn't speak this variety of French. Dialectical differences make communication difficult amongst speakers of most languages: A Bavarian German speaker will likely struggle to understand a German speaker from Cologne; an Italian speaker from Sicily won't be able to understand someone from Milan; and a speaker of perfect Oxford English will likely struggle to understand a Scots speaker from Glasgow.

Dialects are tricky. Dialects are probably one of the features of languages that make communication the most difficult, which is why so many different nations have put in the effort to issue 'standard' varieties of their languages. We have a 'Standard' form of German, of French, and even of English (Oxford English is generally considered to be Standard English).

But language standardization is also dangerous. When languages are standardized, it can often result in local dialects being lost as the standard variety slowly takes on more popularity. Additionally, standardization is often associated with the supremacy of one part of a country over the other parts, as standard varieties are often structured around a prestigious dialect of the language (i.e. Metropolitan French or Standard German which is built around Berlin German). For those of us interested in preserving linguistic diversity, standardization is not a good thing. That being said, standardization makes learning languages easier for a foreigner and allows for easier communication amongst the people of a country.

Frisian: English's Closest Cousin

College Students like to procrastinate. Whether they watch Netflix or go out with friends most students tend to have a favorite means of procrastinating. For me, my favorite way to procrastinate is through educational youtube videos. One of my favorite channels used for this purpose is LangFocus, a channel which focuses on linguistics by exploring what makes certain languages different, and what brings certain languages together. This week, LangFocus released a video about the Frisian language. What is the Frisian language? Frisian is spoken predominately in Northern parts of the Netherlands (although there are dialects of Frisian spoken in parts of Germany and Denmark if my prior knowledge serves me right). Frisian is best known for its relationship to English, with it being the closest relative to English (aside from Scots which has its language status disputed). 

Like German and Dutch, both Frisian and English are examples of West Germanic Languages, meaning that these four languages all share a common ancestor language making them all very closely related; that being said, Frisian and English diverged from one another more recently than most languages in the family, with written Frisian and written English sharing some clear similarities.  For example, LangFocus uses the phrase "Sy hat dit jier fyftjin boeken lezen" or in English "She has read fifteen books this year." The similarities are clear: "Sy" and "She", "fyftjin" and "fifteen", "jier" and "year". That being said, there are some clear differences in word order from this passage compared to English. A key difference, however, is that Frisian maintains two grammatical genders (neuter and common) whereas English lost grammatical gender at some point during the transition between Old and Middle English. 

English has also changed a lot since diverging from Frisian. English underwent a long period of contact with speakers of Old Norse through the Viking Age, and following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, English integrated a lot of French vocabulary into its own.

Despite the differences between the two, Frisian is still considered to be the easiest language for native English speakers to learn, easier than other closely related languages like Afrikaans, German, or Dutch, or languages from which English has borrowed a lot of vocabulary such as French. 

Frisian is also a language in decline. Since the birth of the Netherlands, Frisian has been losing favor to Dutch as the language of government, education, and communication even in the parts of the Netherlands in which it has historically been spoken. It is, like too many minority languages across the world, in decline. It is important for the linguistic and human diversity of this planet that we try to preserve minority languages, like Frisian not just for the sake of those native speakers who love their language, but also because of what minority languages can teach us about ourselves and each other. 

No hablo español // Je ne parle pas français // Ich spreche kein deutsch

Anyone who is a college student today has heard of PewDiePie. Odds are, you’ve probably watched his videos before, maybe you were a fan once, maybe you still are a fan, but regardless, most young people today know him as a larger than life internet celebrity from Sweden who became famous for his Youtube videos about video games. The interesting thing about Pewdiepie is that, despite recording all of his videos exclusively in English, English is not his first language, it’s Swedish. Born and raised in Sweden, Pewdiepie did what all good Swedish children do and went to school where he learned all the most important elements to a child's education in Sweden: Math, Science, History, and English.
 In Sweden, English proficiency is a reality of the school system. All Swedish students are expected to study English from a very young age, and as a result, adult Swedes speak English remarkably well, with 86% of Swedes being proficient in English. This trend is present across European countries, not just Sweden. In the Netherlands, 90% of the population is proficient in English, in Denmark 86% of people speak English, in Austria 73%, in Belgium 60%. In Europe, more and more people are learning to speak English, presenting English as an ever more important language on the world stage. But even in parts of Europe where English isn’t widely taught in schools, schools still teach children to be proficient in other languages, most notably in parts of Central and Eastern Europe where German is taught in most schools and German proficiency is fairly high.
 Meanwhile, only 20% of people in the United States, and 38% of people in the United Kingdom are bilingual; in Canada, a nation which is officially bilingual, only 19.3% of Canadians are bilingual (most of whom speak French natively and English as a second). This demonstrates a serious problem persistent across the English-speaking world, the issue being that English speakers don’t seem to learn languages very well. Why? Honestly, we have no excuse: the United Kingdom has been a part of the EU since the 1970s, and has a history of being in close contact with Europe and the various languages across that continent, Canadians share a country with French speakers, and the United States is one of the biggest recipients of immigrants in the world. What I believe it comes down to is the privilege that native English speakers have by being born speaking English, the new world language for the media, science, business, and politics. English speaking countries are not motivated to teach foreign languages to their children because English is already so prestigious: why should I learn French or Spanish or German if all I need to conduct business, to become a successful scientist, or to even study abroad is English. English speakers don't learn German, or French, or Dutch, or Spanish because most German, or French, or Dutch, or Spanish speakers any English speaker might interact with probably already speak English.
But, in my mind, this shouldn’t excuse native English speakers from learning foreign languages. Americans should make learning new languages a bigger priority by making schools teach foreign languages from a much younger age. Like in the rest of the world, English speaking children should go to school and learn a foreign language rather than waiting until Middle or High School. We should put more money into our schools language programs to higher better language teachers and buy better course materials. Maybe if we as a society focus more attention on learning languages, we can learn to better appreciate the world and its people.

Russia: A Fading Linguistic Gold Mine

Last night, like most nights, I spent some time watching Youtube, when I stumbled upon an interesting video about Russia and its internal (federal) organization. The video explored the system of federal districts which Russia consists of known as 'Oblasts'. Each Oblast functions similarly to how a state would within the United States, as each Oblast has its own set of specialized laws, and rules but is still subject to the Russian Federal Government. With Russia being as diverse as it is, it should come as no surprise that these individual oblasts often consist of their own unique cultures or ethnicities and as a result often have their own regional languages.

Although every Oblast is required to have Russian as an official language, they are allowed to have their own official languages as well, such as a variety of Turkic, Mongolic, or Uralic Languages or languages more familiar to us in the West like Ukranian. I found this to be very interesting, as it suggests something about how Russia works that is often overlooked. Russia is huge, it consists of various different minority groups with over 100 languages being spoken in Russia, and it is rare that such a diverse population of people can all co-exist in a single country. This makes Russia special, and I believe that its system of Oblasts could help accommodate for such coexistence. Because linguistic minorities are allowed to speak in peace, this also suggests cultural and religious tolerance from the Russian Government. 

In fact, as I learned in Russian History last semester, Russia has a long history of allowing minority groups to self govern, and the Russian state was never very interested in forcing people to live, speak, or think a certain way (with the brief exception being parts of the Soviet Period). In this way, I suppose Russia and the United States are similar in that our societies have acquired the framework that minority groups should be free to celebrate their differences from the majority, and of course, speak their own language. But just as is the case in the United States, a lot of minority groups in Russia have the problem of bleeding their local language and culture over time.

There are a lot of languages under threat of extinction within Russia. This is largely due to the fact that a lot of Russian Oblasts consist of a lot of different minority groups, many of which are too small to qualify for their language to receive co-official status within the Oblast. Additionally, the Russian Language was heavily emphasized in schools during parts of the Soviet Period, meaning that regional languages are often spoken by older people and have not been successfully passed on to the younger generation. Most languages under threat in Russia are from the far North-East of Russia where local people live in small isolated populations. Local languages in this part of Russia, as well as across the country, are losing popularity to Russian which is seen as the language of prestige and is used as the Lingua Franca across Russia. Sadly, this trend has existed for decades now and the Russian Government demonstrates no clear desire to fix the issue. 

Language death is a sad thing, and when it occurs it often happens parallel to the death of local cultures and customs. As a person, it is important to oppose the death of different cultures, customs, and languages because it is these differences amongst people that truly make humanity so interesting.