The Synya Khanty (Uralic language family) live in Russia, on a quite large territory (550,000 sqkm). According to the latest census there are 22,500 Khanty, who divide into three regional groups, Northern, Southern and Eastern. The Synya Khanty dialect belongs to the Northern ones.
Like most minority languages in Russia, the Khanty dialects are endangered by the hegemony of Russian. Synya Khanty has no literacy. A more or less consequent grammar has already been worked out for other Northern dialects. The dialects differ so much from one another that it is disturbing for pupils to learn from a book written even in a neighbouring dialect. According to Krauss’s scale, the Khanty dialects are severely endangered.
The Synya Khanty live along River Synya, a western tributary of lower Ob, in a community numbering cca. 1,000 people. They are traditionally hunters, fishers, and reindeer herders, whose most archaic groups live along the upmost flow of Synya next to the mountains of Ural. Travelling down the river, we can find first traditional Khanty villages of 2-3 houses. The regional centre is Ovgort (with hospital, Russian language boarding school, museum etc.). The nearer we get to River Ob, the settlements become more and more Russian in respect of lifestyle, house-type, dressing and other habits, and, evidently, language use.
The present-day Khanty dialects are generally used in home contact. The oldest generation still speaks it as a first language, and understands Russian. The mid-generation uses their mother-tongue only at home, and speaks Russian perfect since it is the language of education, bureaucracy, public life etc. The younger generation tends to lose, or has already lost the language and the culture as well, facing difficulties when trying to communicate with their grandparents.
Thus, the language shift can be examined according to at least two axes, an ethnographical-geographical one (reflecting the way of life), and according to the age of the speakers. Concerning the youngest generation, among the reindeer herding families the Khanty language is still being transmitted from parents to children. Under the age of seven (before studying at boarding schools) they are monolingual speakers, although the young parents, because of Russian language education, are bilingual, and code-switching is quite frequent depending on e.g. the topic.
Among the town-dwellers, intergenerational transmission has stopped, children do not even understand the common Khanty phrases or expressions.
In this paper I will concentrate on the different opinions of some linguists and ethnologists expertising in this areal, concerning the present situation of Synya Khanty dialect. On the one hand, its survival seems to depend on the „minimum-sized core group of language-dominant speakers”, i.e. the last speakers are the children of the most archaic, isolated groups. This suggests that the language should be maintained by collecting folk genres, and by making them available for the indigenous people (tapes, CDs etc), as well as by creating different kinds of forums (festivals, clubs) sustaining language use.
On the other hand, literacy could open up new vistas, the prestige of Synya Khanty should be raised by producing (school)books, papers, homepages, translations.
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