CHULYM TURKS: POPULATION DECREASE AS A RESULT OF ETHNOLINGUISTIC SELF-IDENTITY TRANSFORMATION
Chulym Turks are an indigenous people group inhabiting the middle flow of River Chulym in the Tomsk Region and Krasnoyarsk Territory who were officially recognized only in 2000. Some scholars claim the Chulym Turks to be part of the Khakass people, however, this is not considered justified (see works by A. P. Dul’zon, E. L. L’vova etc.) due to this becoming an excessively generalized grouping of ethnic groups detached historically and quite differing linguistically. There are several criteria possibly satisfying the demand for identifying an indigenous group: etymology of (last) names, sociological characteristics, language, etc. Nevertheless, the Chulym Turkic linguistic varieties have never been normalized, the system of writing has not been introduced which strongly hinders the ‘objective’ analysis of the quality of language use among the community. Moreover, the questions on language use in the All-Russian censuses of 2002 and 2010 demanded answers based on the population’s self-estimation only and did not provide a specification of the terms used (especially regarding language). The author suggests that the term native language (Russian родной язык) used in the questionnaire of the censuses actually implies a traditional ethnic language whereas the population’s understanding of the former term makes direct parallels with the original lexeme from which the term native (Russian родной) is derived: a ‘clan, family, kin’. Thus, when claiming the Chulym Turkic language to be a native language the respondent must not necessarily have reflected the language they were fluent at, while their selection of nationality (Russian национальность) may have been the result of preference in favor of this or that community with a strong economic and social motivation. In this light, the author believes that the drastic decrease of the Chulym Turkic population from 656 in 2002 to 355 in 2010 is accounted for the transformation of ethnolinguistic selfidentification rather than any ‘natural’ reasons.
Keywords: Chulym Turks, ethnos, identification, ethnolinguistic self-identity
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Issue: 2, 2013
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 50 — 55
Downloads: 2090