This paper is a case study of a trilingual community in South-Western Daghestan, comparing the functions of the languages spoken and examining speakers’ attitudes towards each of the languages they speak. The paper is based on the author’s own fieldwork.
Archi belongs to the Lezgic group of the Nakh-Daghestanian. Archi speakers (about 1200) live compactly in several small villages in the center of the high-mountain Daghestan. The language is unwritten. They exist in a multilingual environment, surrounded by Laks and Avars, whose languages are only very remotely affiliated with Archi. They are also literary languages with strong written tradition and many thousands of speakers.
At home, the Archis only speak Archi. When a child comes to school he only knows Archi and none of the major languages. However, the school education is exclusively in Avar (in primary school) and Russian (in secondary school). Thus, the vast majority of adult Archis already speak three languages.
The need for Russian linguistic competence is clear for all Archis and produces no protest or rejection. All Archis approve of the fact their children start learning Russian from the first grade on. Interestingly, there is no need to speak Russian in the village of Archi itself. The perceived necessity to speak Russian results from pressures from the ‘outside world’. Today in Daghestan it is impossible to get higher education without speaking Russian, or even to live in larger towns where Russian is a lingua franca. Russian is thus the language that covers most important social needs of the Archis.
In his/her everyday life, an Archi communicates in Avar somewhat more frequently than in Russian. Often, people come to Archi from the neighboring Avar villages. Archis code-switch to Avar immediately after they leave their own village. Functionally, however, there is virtually no communicative situation when the knowledge of Avar is indeed necessary, because most Avars have a perfect knowledge of Russian. However, Archis are genuinely convinced they need to know Avar. The most important factor is that in the 1920s Archi has been assigned to the Charoda raion where Avars were a majority, so that the Archis were included into the Avar nation. Today, all Archis are officially registered as Avars and are taught Avar during their ‘mother tongue lessons’.
The result of this long-lasting policy is that young Archis indeed consider themselves to be Avars. Affiliating with the Avar nation is seen as bringing various social advantages. Even in Daghestan nobody knows who the Archis are except their immediate neighbors; the Avars, on the contrary, are very numerous and known even outside the Republic. By calling themselves Avars, the Archis become included in a powerful ethnic group. We also assume that, somewhat paradoxically, this shift of self-indentification contributed to a change in speakers’ attitude towards Archi – young generations of Archis, now well-placed in the ethnic balance of Daghestan, may ‘afford’ exhibiting interest and pride in their mother tongue.
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