Maintaining the Indigenous Udmurt Language beyond the Community: An Autoethnographic Analysis

Abstract

In this article, I emphasize the importance of maintaining and transmitting indigenous languages to the next generations, and I explore the motivations and difficulties of indigenous language speakers to do so when living far away from their native language community. The article is an autoethnographic analysis that amplifies the insider’s perspective and reflects on my own thoughts, perceptions, and emotional reactions regarding my language use practices. Specifically, I analyze the use of the Udmurt language with my children and the process of writing a blog in Udmurt. As a researcher of the Udmurt language, I use my previous sociolinguistic studies in the analysis and place it within the broader context of indigenous peoples from Russia. Indigenous languages often involve the use of multiple languages simultaneously, including language mixing, which is entirely natural. In societies with a monolingual language ideology, such practices are seen as signs of linguistic incompetence, leading to feelings of shame or inferiority among indigenous speakers. This negatively impacts the preservation of indigenous languages. Raising sociolinguistic and emotional awareness about how indigenous languages function and sharing personal experiences, including negative ones, can help overcome these challenges.

1. Introduction

As of today, there are approximately 7000 languages in the world, with the majority being indigenous and at risk of extinction (Eberhard et al. 2024). In recent years, there have been a significant number of scholarly publications emphasizing the importance of preserving and revitalizing indigenous languages that are facing disappearance (e.g., Grenoble and Whaley 2006; Hinton and Hale 2008; Zamyatin et al. 2012; Pasanen 2015). Nevertheless, the importance of maintaining indigenous languages is not an evident fact. Many language communities face challenges in passing their languages on to the next generations. This issue is particularly acute for most Finno-Ugric languages spoken in Russia, where many peoples struggle with language transmission, and some languages are highly endangered (UNESCO 2003). As a rule, an indigenous language is maintained within its natural linguistic environment, where the majority of the language community resides together and continues to use the language, or the speakers themselves or their surrounding communities have a clear conscious stance on language preservation (Pasanen 2015).

The main objective of this paper is to reflect on the process of maintaining an indigenous language from an insider’s perspective and to discover what allows the speakers of indigenous languages to maintain their native languages while living in emigration and far beyond their native communities. In particular, I use the method of autoethnography to reflect on my own thoughts, perceptions, and emotional reactions regarding my language use practices. Specifically, I analyze the use of the Udmurt language with my children and the process of writing a blog in Udmurt. As a researcher of the Udmurt language, I use my previous sociolinguistic studies in the analysis and place it within the broader context of indigenous peoples from Russia. In the autoethnographic analysis, I discuss the following questions: What influenced my decision to speak to my children in the Udmurt language and write a blog in Udmurt while living far from the language community? What difficulties arose in the process of transmitting the language to my children, and what are these difficulties related to? What helps to overcome these difficulties? How can the practice of writing influence the preservation of an indigenous language? What do my experiences have in common with those of other indigenous peoples living in Russia?

The method of autoethnography is important for studying indigenous peoples (Ellis et al. 2011, p. 16). Research on indigenous communities has often been conducted within colonial frameworks, treating them as mere objects of study and ignoring their agency. Since the 1970s, indigenous studies have worked to decolonize research methodologies (Smith 1999; Denzin et al. 2008; Kovach 2009; Bagele 2012; Virtanen et al. 2021). These efforts emphasize the importance of using indigenous methods and ethics, involving indigenous researchers and participants, and incorporating personal experiences and traditional knowledge into academia. This approach helps restore the voices of unrepresented indigenous peoples.

In this study, I identify the Udmurt language and people as indigenous. However, according to Russian legislation, the Udmurt people do not have this status. The official definition set by Russian legislation grants indigenous status only to communities with populations of less than 50,000. Nevertheless, within the broader international context, the Udmurt people may be viewed as indigenous, given their continued practice of traditional ways of life.

While decolonial methods in the study of indigenous peoples are actively discussed worldwide, this topic is new in the context of the indigenous peoples of Russia. Generally, the peoples of Russia are studied within definitions and research traditions established during the Soviet era. Indigenous scholars, educated within the Soviet and post-Soviet systems, actively research their own ethnic communities and languages, but often they do so from an external perspective, leaving their personal experiences and emotional insights out of their scientific research.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Udmurt scholars noted the unhealthy state of the Udmurt community, characterized by feelings of “inferiority” and “second-class status”, “isolation”, “shame in speaking the Udmurt language”, “unwillingness to pass the language on to children” (Nikitina 1992; Razin 1994; Grishkina 1994; Klestov 1998), and so on. Some of the Udmurt scholars attributed these feelings to aspects of ethnic psychology, which explains these issues by the psychological characteristics of the Udmurt ethnic group (Klestov 1998; Shklaev 2003).

Such negative feelings and attitudes particularly negatively impact the process of preserving and transmitting the language to future generations (Klestov 1998). However, there have hardly been any studies so far that have examined these issues from the insider’s perspective, using concrete examples from one’s own life or the lives of people close to the author, and described this experience based on scientific methods.

This article offers an autoethnographic analysis of my personal experience in preserving, studying, and writing in the Udmurt language. Researchers note (Ellis et al. 2011; Anderson 2006) that the method of autoethnography embodies, theoretically, an insider’s perspective; it enables a reflective rethinking of the emotional side of the studied process and connects lived experiences within a broader sociocultural context. Thus, my personal feelings of “inferiority” or “difficulty in passing the language on to children” can acquire a broader societal context, shaped by social factors rather than merely my personal experiences or my individual and ethnic psychological characteristics, as suggested by ethnic psychology theory.

The structure of the study is as follows: in the Section 1, I provide the general context of the study, namely the relevance of preserving indigenous languages and the need to examine this process from an insider’s perspective. The Section 2 provides general information about the indigenous Udmurt community and language, including Udmurts living beyond the community. In the Section 3, I describe the main theoretical principles of the autoethnographic method, which form the basis of the analysis. The Section 4 presents the actual autoethnographic analysis, where I delve into my personal experience of preserving and transmitting the Udmurt language within my family, as well as analyze my experience of writing a blog in the Udmurt language. Finally, in the Section 5, I discuss my personal experience in a broader context, including scientific and theoretical contexts, and draw conclusions.

2. The Udmurt Community and Language

2.1. General Information

The Udmurt language belongs to one of the largest branches of the Finno-Ugric language family, namely the Permic branch which also includes the Komi languages, and it is spoken in the area between the rivers Vyatka and Kama on the southwestern side of the Ural Mountains in Russia. Today, there are approximately 386,000 Udmurt people, and among them, there are approximately 265,000 speakers of the Udmurt language (Census 2021).1 The official numbers show that over the last ten years, the number of speakers has declined by around 100,000 people (Census 2011; Census 2021; Lallukka 2024). Even though the results of censuses are doubtful, it is evident even without numbers that the language situation is rapidly deteriorating. When I was in school in my village at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the whole school was Udmurt-speaking (outside of classes because school instruction was in Russian) and so was the entire village population. Today, after 30 years, the Russian language dominates among schoolchildren, and the Russian-speaking population of the village is growing fast as well.

Most of the Udmurt people live in the Udmurt Republic. This was established as the Votyak Autonomous Region in 1920 following the Bolshevik Revolution, and the early years of the Soviet state saw the official promotion of the Udmurt language and culture. It was during this period that the modern Udmurt literary language was formalized (Vakhrushev 1975; Karakulov 2006; Edygarova 2022). However, in the 1930s, much of the Udmurt intelligentsia suffered repression, and moreover, linguistic russification began, leading to a prohibition on language purism throughout the Soviet era. New vocabulary in Udmurt was forcibly borrowed from Russian (Tarakanov 1998; Edygarova 2022). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new wave of language purism emerged in response to the earlier restrictions, yet the modern standard language became increasingly unfamiliar to many Udmurt speakers (Edygarova 2013, 2014). Today, while efforts have been made to purify the literary language, spoken Udmurt is, as a rule, mixed with Russian (Edygarova 2018; Pischlöger 2016, 2021).

In 1995, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Udmurt language obtained the status as an official language of the Udmurt Republic (Krasil’nikov 1998). This was a sign of cultural and linguistic renaissance after the strict control and discriminative policy of the Soviet Union (Alpatov 2000; Zamyatin 2022; Vasiljeva and Voroncov 2008). Despite its official status, the language situation today is dramatic. In particular, the use of the Udmurt language in public sectors is very restricted (Casen 2013). Even though there are official instructions to translate all official names and signage of state organizations into Udmurt, it is impossible to receive any public services in the Udmurt language, except in villages where the language is still used. The use of Udmurt is mainly restricted to small sectors that are intended for the Udmurt language and culture (Casen 2013, p. 5).

The Udmurt language is taught as a school subject, but there is no school instruction in Udmurt. It is impossible to learn mathematics, biology, or history in the Udmurt language. Until 2007, the teaching of the Udmurt language was regulated by the regional government, but since that year, it has come under the responsibility of the municipalities (Zamyatin 2012; Protassova et al. 2014). As Protassova et al. (2014, p. 24) notice, due to discriminatory policies, many parents do not want their children to study their native language in school because bilingualism is seen as disadvantageous to them, and knowledge of the native language is deemed useless.

Nevertheless, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there have also been positive changes. In particular, among people born after the dissolution, there is a more positive attitude towards the Udmurt language (Bulatova and Protassova 2010), as well as creative activities aimed at popularizing the Udmurt language and culture (Casen 2013, 2014; Pischlöger 2016, 2021). The Udmurt language is also actively used on social networks and the Internet, and the peak of its popularity in the Udmurt Republic occurred in 2012 when the Udmurt group Buranovskiye Babushki took second place in Eurovision (Pischlöger 2021).

2.2. The Udmurt Language beyond the Community

There are several large Udmurt communities that live outside the Udmurt Republic. Some of them reside in their traditional territories, which were not included in the Udmurt Autonomous Oblast when its borders were defined in the early 1920s. Among them are a big community in what is now Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and the Perm and Kirov Oblasts. There is a small community in the Sverdlovsk region, as well as new Udmurt communities in Siberia, e.g., in the Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk regions (Khristolubova and Vladykin 1997, p. 29; Lebedeva 2008; Anisimov et al. 2020; Pchelovodova and Anisimov 2021). There are also diasporas in bigger cities of Russia, e.g., in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and they organize some cultural activities, including providing non-regular courses of the Udmurt language.

Some researchers, as well as my personal observations, indicate that the linguistic and ethnic identity of some Udmurt communities living beyond the Udmurt Republic is stronger. As Toulouze (2017) notes, the situation with the Udmurt language is better among Udmurts living in the territory of Bashkortostan than in the Udmurt Republic. According to Toulouze, the multilingual situation and positive attitudes toward multilingualism in the Republic of Bashkortostan contribute to a better status for minority languages in Bashkortostan, which is not the case in the Udmurt Republic.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, partnerships between Russia’s Finno-Ugric peoples and other countries flourished. Many new programs and grant foundations were established. Specifically, active teaching of the Udmurt language began in Finland (Salminen and Jefremov 2008) and in Hungary. There is non-regular teaching of Udmurt in Estonia as well. As a result of programs for educational exchanges, many young Udmurt people came to Europe and eventually started families and settled in Europe. Today, there are communities of Udmurt people in Estonia, Hungary, Finland, and Germany. Probably the biggest and most active community is in Estonia, which has an organization of the local Udmurts called Oshmes (meaning ‘Spring’), two musical groups, and other cultural activities devoted to the Udmurt language and culture.

I myself was also a beneficiary of such Finno-Ugric programs and studied at the University of Tartu on a scholarship for five years. In 2010, I came to Helsinki for an internship under another Finno-Ugric program, and I have been living in Helsinki ever since. I also began writing this article during a Kindred Peoples Fellowship awarded by the Finnish National Agency for Education. In Finland, I have my own Udmurt-speaking network. There are probably some twenty Udmurt people in Finland in different places; my personal networking consists of around ten people. I also have strong contacts with the Udmurt people from Estonia since I studied there. Furthermore, I also communicate with the Udmurt people from everywhere in Europe, with whom I had contact already when I still lived in the Udmurt Republic.

3. The Theory of Autoethnography

The theory of autoethnography focuses on an individual’s experience and studies it in the broader social and cultural context. The method involves not only a rational and detached approach to the object of study but also integrates the intimate and emotional experiences of both the researcher and the subject being studied (Ellis et al. 2011, p. 21; Denshire 2014). Thus, the present study examines the problem of indigenous language transmission from an insider’s perspective, relying on personal experience and considering the subjectivity of the research process.

The positionality and values of the researcher become crucial in autoethnography, as the social status and characteristics (such as gender, class, religion, etc.) of the researcher can influence their perception of the object of study (Ellis et al. 2011, p. 4; Anderson 2006, pp. 379–82). According to Anderson (2006, pp. 379–80), in analytic autoethnography, the researcher should be a complete member of the social world under study in order to approximate the emotional stance of the people they study (see also Adler and Adler 1987, p. 67). Other researchers also note that autoethnography delves into the insider perspective or examines societies from within. The notion of an insider traditionally aligns with being native to a culture, yet non-natives can also adopt an insider’s viewpoint (Reed-Danahay 2021). These discussions encompass questions of identity, self-perception, voice, and authenticity, as well as experiences of cultural displacement and exile.

Anderson proposes that the researcher’s role in analytic autoethnography should be visible, active, and reflexively engaged in the text, but also the researcher should engage in dialogue with “data” and “others” (Anderson 2006, pp. 383–86).

Finally, Anderson defines one more important parameter in autoethnography, namely the commitment to theoretical analysis (Anderson 2006, p. 378). The researcher notes that it is not only documentation of personal experience and giving an “insider’s perspective” that is valuable for study but also connecting this experience with a broader theoretical context (Anderson 2006, p. 378).

Deborah Reed-Danahay (2021, p. 2) defines several types of autoethnographic studies: (1) native anthropology, i.e., studies “in which people who were formerly the subjects of ethnography become the authors of studies of their own group”; (2) ethnic autobiography, i.e., the study of “personal narratives written by members of ethnic minority groups”; and (3) autobiographical ethnography, i.e., the study of the researcher’s “personal experience into ethnographic writing”. The present study covers all types of autoethnographic studies that Reed-Danahay proposes:

(1) The framework of native anthropology takes into account my background of being a native member, a parent who transmits her native language to her children, and representative of native researchers of an Udmurt-speaking community. It must be noted that being a native scholar does not automatically mean being an expert in native culture and ethnography (e.g., Silan and Munkejord 2023). This corresponds to the term from Anderson of “a complete member in the social word under study” (Anderson 2006, p. 379), which means a deep involvement and understanding of the studied group.

I conduct the autoethnographic analysis primarily from the perspective of a member of the indigenous Udmurt people. I was born and lived in traditional Udmurt villages Gondyrvai and Poroz from the Sharkan district of the Udmurt Republic until I finished secondary school. During this time, my dominant language was the variety of Udmurt spoken in my village community. I learned literary Udmurt through Udmurt language and literature classes, reading, and later while studying at the Faculty of Udmurt Philology at the Udmurt State University. I also learned Russian, as it was the main language of the school instruction, as well as most television and radio broadcasts and books. By the time I finished secondary school, I was fully bilingual. This linguistic experience has influenced my language practices in communicating with my children (see Section 4.1).

In this analysis, I also take on the role of a parent transmitting my indigenous language while living outside the language community, and I examine my perceptions and emotional reactions to different language practices and forms of communication with my children.

Furthermore, I conduct the analysis from the position of an indigenous researcher. I studied Udmurt philology at the Udmurt State University. After graduating, in 2005, I began doctoral studies at the University of Tartu, where I researched Udmurt morphosyntax. Since 2011, I have continued my scientific career as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, studying language variation, language attitudes and language ideologies, and the history of the Udmurt and Komi languages.

(2) In the analysis, I utilize texts that I wrote between 2019 and 2022 and published on my personal blog. The majority of these texts are written in Udmurt and cover various genres such as popular science articles, two interviews, literary fiction, travelogues, and recipes. Specifically, I analyze how these texts reflect the evolution of my internal narratives regarding the Udmurt language, as well as which language forms and styles I use in my texts and how the use of different styles affects my perception of the text, including emotional perception.

(3) The analysis also applies the framework of autobiographical ethnography, where the focus is on my experience as a researcher, particularly as a linguist. In the paper, I analytically and reflectively approach my choices of language and ethnic identities and the changes they have undergone. I focus more on events in my life that were important in the sense of linguistic choices, decisions, and attitudes. The ways in which I perceived, cognitively recognized, and reacted emotionally to these events have influenced my choices. Ellis calls these live events “epiphanies” and defines them as “remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life; times of existential crises that forced a person to attend to and analyze lived experience; and events after which life does not seem quite the same” (Ellis et al. 2011, p. 6).

4. The Autoethnographic Analysis

In this section, I analyze two processes: (1) the preservation of the Udmurt language within my family, specifically focusing on the language use with my children. My attention is not on specific language practices and strategies, but rather on my personal feelings and perceptions, including my emotional responses to usage of the Udmurt language. (2) The second process is writing a blog in the Udmurt language. I view this process as a positive example of how an individual can not only preserve but also develop and experiment with their native language, regardless of vocabulary and functional restrictions and their location far beyond the community.

4.1. Udmurt as a Family Language

As Protassova et al. (2014, p. 24) conclude, bilingualism among the Udmurt and other minority populations in the Volga region is not regarded as advantageous. Transmission of the native language is seen as posing a threat to the child, or parents fear that because of the native language, the child will not learn to speak Russian well enough and will not succeed in school (Protassova et al. 2014).

As I mentioned earlier, within the Udmurt community there are many negative attitudes towards the Udmurt language and its transmission to children. In particular, the Udmurt language lacks prestige. Additionally, the native language often evokes a sense of shame, as it is associated with rural life and a lack of education (Nikitina 1992; Razin 1994). This phenomenon is common among many representatives of ethnic groups in Russia. For example, a Tatar (Rasuleva 2024), a Nenets (Neseine 2024), and a Dolgan (Bolshakova 2024) have spoken about feeling this sense of shame.

Negative attitudes are more common among the elder generation who were born and grew up during the Soviet era (Protassova et al. 2014), while among the younger generation, especially those who were born after the fall of the Soviet Union, there are more positive attitudes (Bulatova and Protassova 2010).

Therefore, when parents decide to speak the Udmurt language with their children outside the traditional village, it always attracts attention as a rather abnormal, exceptional phenomenon. For me, it was also a conscious decision. In particular, I saw the experience of my friends, mainly residing in Estonia, who deliberately communicated in Udmurt with their children.2 In this network, speaking Udmurt with one’s children became a sign of being an educated Udmurt living abroad. This practice has become popular primarily among students who have studied Finno-Ugric languages and have often participated in international exchange programs or immediately went abroad to study through Finno-Ugric programs. Today many of these individuals live abroad and bring up their children in Udmurt. I also belong to this category of parents.

There are also other categories of Udmurt-speaking parents, mainly living in Udmurtia, who consciously transmit the language to their children. Most of them belong to the younger generation born after the fall of the Soviet Union. For example, the Bilingva community and the non-profit organization Anykaj organize language activities for parents and children.

I was already living in Helsinki when my two children were born. My husband is French, so we decided to use the strategy of “one parent–one language” with our children. This language strategy involves one parent speaking to the child only in one language, while the other parent speaks in the other language (Barron-Hauwaert 2004). The children started attending daycare early, at the age of one. As a result, they began speaking simultaneously in three languages: Udmurt, French, and Finnish. Throughout their time in daycare, all languages developed roughly equally.

After maternity leave, I continued working as a researcher and conducted sociolinguistic studies on the Udmurt language. Therefore, as a linguist, I was interested in observing how my children’s languages were developing. In fact, among the languages spoken by my children, Udmurt soon began to lag behind the other languages. I myself also began to use Finnish more often to explain more complex things. Additionally, in our family, I took on the role of communicator in Finnish with the children’s school and other institutions because I spoke Finnish better than my husband. Usually, when the whole family is together, we speak French. I am proficient enough in French, but I make mistakes when speaking. When I speak Udmurt, I mainly address the children. The younger one responds in Finnish. In communication with their father, the children always use French and in communication with each other, they use Finnish. I decided not to speak Russian with my children in early childhood and planned to teach them Russian later.

At times, I felt hurt that in our family, Udmurt remained the weakest language. I often felt a sense of loneliness when I spoke Udmurt with my children. Negative feelings also arose when I participated in events on bilingualism for Russian-speaking families living in Finland. On one hand, I understood that there was insufficient language material available in Udmurt, and as the children grew older, suitable material became even scarcer. The main Udmurt-speaking environment for my children was my parents, sister, and brother. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I would visit my family once a year. After the lockdown was enforced, communication was over the phone, which cannot replace live communication. On the other hand, I understood that my children would never engage in discussions on complex topics solely in Udmurt, as modern Udmurts (including myself) use either Russian or a mixed Udmurt–Russian language for such conversations.

My background as a sociolinguist helped me to cope with some struggles. For example, I understand that the limited use of the Udmurt language, primarily in education—specifically, the fact that essential subjects are not taught in Udmurt at school—results in us possessing an insufficient vocabulary and lacking practice for discussing more abstract and complex topics in Udmurt.3 This became one of the reasons why I started writing a blog: I wanted to develop my language skills to speak smoothly in Udmurt on any topic. Moreover, my goal was to bring the form of the Udmurt language as close to colloquial speech as possible: I tried not to use too many neologisms, and at the same time I also avoided using too many Russian borrowings unnecessarily. I also decided to use, with my children, forms from my native dialect, though as an educated Udmurt philologist, I also use many forms from other dialects and the standard language.

It can be said that the Udmurt language with which I communicate with my children, is our own unique Udmurt family language, something that only we speak. For example, similarly to Western etiquette, I tell my children Umoj bab! ’Good night!’ (lit. ‘Sleep well!’); in this phrase, bab is the imperative form of the verb babyny, which means ‘to sleep’ in Udmurt children’s language. Sometimes I translate the names of foods into Udmurt, such as translating Finnish suklaatyyny, literally ‘chocolate pillows’ and referring to a type of breakfast cereal, directly into Udmurt as minder ‘pillow’. Sometimes, I also invent my own words, e.g., zibon ‘button’ (derived from the verb zibyny ‘to push’). When my children communicate with Udmurts from different dialect areas, I have to translate some words into our family’s Udmurt. When my children communicate with their Udmurt grandmother and grandfather, I also have to remind my parents that there are Udmurt equivalents for Russian borrowings; for example, the following words in my family from the Udmurt Republic are used regularly in Russian when speaking Udmurt: berjoza ‘birch’, jozhik ‘hedgehog’, and jolka ‘fir tree’. I remind them that in Udmurt and in our native dialect, there are words like kyz’pu ‘birch’, tchushjal ‘hedgehog’, and kyz ‘fir tree’.4

Often, speaking only a minority language without knowledge of the dominant Russian language can lead to difficulties for my children in communicating with their cousins or the children of my close friends who have limited or no knowledge of the Udmurt language. Communication difficulties without knowledge of Russian can also arise in Udmurt-speaking environments. My children know Udmurt numerals well (the result of board games). However, some Udmurts primarily use composite numerals in Russian. Once, my eldest son went to the store in my native village to buy ice cream. The Udmurt-speaking saleswoman stated the amount in Russian. The child asked her to say it in Udmurt. The saleswoman replied that she did not know the Udmurt names of numbers.

Furthermore, in my research (Edygarova 2016), I describe the Udmurt people as living in a culture of the standard language (e.g., Milroy 2007). This is a linguistic culture (this term is from Schiffman’s 2006) or language ideology (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994) characterized by monolingualism, where typically only the standard variety of the language is considered legitimate, and one must master this standard variety perfectly, without any accent or grammatical errors. Such an ideology views the use of mixed varieties or non-standard varieties (e.g., dialects and slang) as linguistic incompetence on the part of the speaker. This ideology is typical of Russian-speaking, French, and Finnish language cultures.

I believe that in the context of preserving indigenous languages, monolingual ideologies can negatively impact the desire to transmit one’s language to one’s children. After attending in Helsinki some bilingualism events that had a monolingual approach to bilingualism (e.g., a strict separation of two languages), I began to think that if I spoke to my children in Russian instead of Udmurt, I would have more opportunities and it would be much easier to transmit the “full-fledged” form of the language to them. However, indigenous languages teach us that languages cannot exist in isolation from each other, and multilingualism is a completely normal and natural state for them. It is important to understand and remember this when we pass on our indigenous language to our children, especially when we as parents ourselves grew up in a monolingual and standard language culture and from childhood, we experienced negative reactions to our 'incorrect' accent or grammatical mistakes when speaking the dominant language.

Another important factor that helps me cope with these difficulties is considering emotions. In isolation, with limited media and educational resources, and limited interaction with native speakers, it is challenging to maintain children’s speaking of a language. Additionally, as children grow older, communication becomes more difficult because I lack the words for full interaction with them when speaking about more abstract and complex issues. This causes an emotional burden, particularly feelings of failure in language transmission, a sense of incomplete language proficiency, shame that I cannot maintain the language at a high level, fear that my children will experience similar negative feelings, and so on. Additionally, I have noticed that I have many unconscious negative attitudes and feelings towards the Udmurt language, which unexpectedly surface in various circumstances and which I acquired at different periods of my life. These feelings are deeply rooted in the body, with strong reactions occurring suddenly and unconsciously. For instance, once when my children were in a playground in Izhevsk, I started to loudly chide them in Udmurt, as I sometimes do in Helsinki. Suddenly, I sensed that everyone in the playground stopped and stared at me. My mind and body reacted automatically as if paralyzing me and disconnecting me from reality. I felt a mix of shame, fear, stress, and anxiety. My entire body signaled that it was unsafe to speak this language in that particular place. Later, I reflected that such a reaction is related to a traumatic experience with the language used at my earlier age.

I frequently experienced these feelings when my children were small and sometimes still experience them. However, I did not initially connect them to the social and cultural context of the indigenous language, attributing these feelings instead to my own psychological weaknesses. At one point, I started feeling unwell. Thus, I made a decision to learn more about emotions, including putting my own emotions in Udmurt down on paper. I particularly focused on learning names and expressions in Udmurt. Through writing and learning about emotions, and publishing texts about these experiences on my blog, I realized that growing up in an environment where the Udmurt language was not valued and was more associated with feelings of shame and ”inferiority”, this linguistic experience had become an emotional trauma for me. A scientific and rational approach was not enough to overcome unhealthy emotional reactions. I had to engage in a lot of emotional and physical work to somewhat rid myself of these unhealthy reactions. Additionally, one of the important realizations was that the main problem lies not in my personal or ethnic psychological characteristics, but in the unhealthy sociocultural attitudes that exist in modern society, not only among the Udmurts but also among the dominant or Russian-speaking community and in the overall discriminatory and colonial attitudes and settings towards indigenous or minority peoples of Russia.

Aneta Pavlenko, in her book Emotions and Multilingualism (Pavlenko 2005), provides examples where intense emotional upheavals can cause a person to abandon their native language, as the language becomes a strong emotional trigger for the trauma. David Crystal (2000) notes that the phenomena of collective poor well-being and language loss are interconnected, and they are typical for many indigenous peoples. In this context, it can be argued that for members of indigenous communities, language trauma is more likely a collective trauma (Alexander 2004, 2010), which can primarily be healed collectively by rethinking the past of the language community and redefining the current cultural and social status, attitudes, and ideologies of both minority and dominant societies. I believe that the monolingual attitudes and ideologies of the majority of societies, including the international or global world, not only fail to improve the well-being of indigenous peoples but do not contribute to linguistic equality in the world as a whole.

4.2. Writing a Blog in the Udmurt Language

In 2016, Udmurt became the most popular and frequently used language on the social network VKontakte among the non-Russian languages in Russia (Pischlöger 2021, pp. 91–92). Specifically, there are numerous groups in the Udmurt language on this social network, as well as the use of Udmurt on personal pages and in comments. In 2021, Pischlöger also described the presence of many blogs in the Udmurt language (Pischlöger 2021, pp. 92–96). I started writing my blog Shumpoton ‘Joy’ in the Udmurt language in 2019. One of the main reasons I started writing the blog was to speak about emotions in the Udmurt language and with the Udmurt people. Through writing, I was learning to speak about feelings and to express them through my native Udmurt language, especially in communication with my children. I decided to write down my feelings on paper. In the beginning, this felt very strange, and moreover, I used a mixed Udmurt–Russian language, which triggered feelings of being an “inferior” and “undeveloped” speaker. However, later I became more fluent in writing and found a balance between “pure” and “mixed” language forms, and I understood that the “living” language is important for emotional ties with the language. I wrote my first blog post about this process and titled it Udmurt kyl no emocios jake kyz’y Udmurt kyl mone burmytiz ‘The Udmurt language and emotions, or how the Udmurt language healed me’. In this text, I spoke about how I was learning the names of emotions in Udmurt and how it helped me to better understand my physical reactions and the body.

Another of the main reasons I started writing a blog was to enhance my proficiency in Udmurt. I aimed to engage in discussions with my children about abstract and complex topics, much like my husband does in the French language during our meals together. However, I realized it was extremely challenging for me to express these ideas in Udmurt because I had never discussed such matters in the language before. The most difficult part was finding the right words, as these discussions typically occur in Russian, and Udmurt equivalents exist only in the written form, which I preferred not to use when speaking with my children. Moreover, my children were unfamiliar with Russian words when I used them. Thus, I believed that active writing would aid me in improving my spoken fluency. Thus, I wrote popular science texts primarily about language and emotions. Additionally, I have written recipes for my favorite dishes and about my travels. I have released two interviews with Udmurt women living in Europe. We discussed how ethnic identity changes when living in large European cities.

In the writing process, I deliberately used different varieties of the Udmurt language that I have studied in my academic work (Edygarova 2013, 2014, 2016, 2022). I was interested in knowing how they could be applied in different genres and how language forms affect the emotional perception of both the writer and the reader. In blog texts, I prefer to use forms from my native dialect and sometimes even mixed forms over neologisms. Using only pure forms and neologisms gives me the feeling that I am using langue du bois or ‘wooden language’, which lacks an emotional connection for me. I also realized that when I write about complex issues in a simplified way in the Udmurt language, I understand these things much better.

In my blog, I also publish fictional texts where I conduct various linguistic experiments, e.g., using mixed varieties, using only my native dialect, using more ‘purified’ language with many neologisms, and using taboo words and expressions. In one fiction story, I mainly employ my native dialect and mixed Udmurt–Russian speech, as used by my family from an Udmurt village. The language of this text turned out to be the most emotionally close and alive for me. Thus, when I write texts in different genres, as well as, for example, literary texts on various topics, I can apply different styles of language, namely using dialects and bilingual forms alongside a pure and more standard version, which is a rich and valuable artistic tool for a writer. In the comments left on my blog posts, I have received feedback from readers stating that the language style I use is “light” and “alive” which makes the texts even more interesting.

In the fictional stories, I also described language situations that clearly and simply illustrate the sociolinguistic situation of the Udmurt language. In an early fictional text, the main character—an 11-year-old boy named D’urik—describes how his linguist mother tries to teach her children a pure Udmurt language, but when she becomes tired, she automatically starts using Russian words. The boy’s parents speak different dialects, and his younger brother speaks more in Russian or in a mixed Russian–Udmurt language, something he is accustomed to from going to a daycare in the city.

In addition, I have written several texts that can be considered decolonial writing (Mignolo 2011; Ruiz and Baca 2017; Lee 2023). Decolonial writing focuses mainly on overcoming and healing trauma which is widely discussed by postcolonial writers. To decolonize writing means not only to let “grammatical mistakes” stand but also to open a new perspective on the world deeply embedded in the local forms of knowledge. Using non-standard language varieties in the writing process, including mixed varieties (e.g., Udmurt–Russian), can also be regarded as a decolonial strategy in writing (Lee 2023). “To an Udmurt Woman” is one such text, where I write about how the Udmurt woman evaluates herself through external eyes and parameters defined by dominant cultures and societies, and therefore almost always perceives herself as “worse than others”.

Since 2019, I have published 24 blog posts. Since the first publication, the blog has garnered over 13,000 total views, primarily from Russia and through the social network VKontakte. The main audience of my blog is women aged 35 and older, predominantly living in rural areas. My texts have become quite popular, and three of them have been published in periodicals in the Udmurt Republic. The most popular post became the Russian-language text Nastojashchij udmurtskij jazyk ‘The Authentic Udmurt Language’, where I write about the sociolinguistic features of the Udmurt language, the connection between the indigenous language and the territory where people live, and how the native language, emotions, and the body are interconnected (see English version in Edygarova 2024b).

The process of writing in Udmurt has brought me many positive feelings such as joy, happiness, and relief. Ellis et al. (2011, pp. 25–27) are right in saying that writing has a therapeutic impact. By sharing my experiences and knowledge, including negative ones, I received positive feedback and gratitude from readers, which gave strength and significance to my writing and in general to my experience and work.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I have written four posts, but I stopped writing after that. Due to the intensifying military propaganda, interaction with readers became difficult or even impossible.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

The main objective of this paper is to reflect on the process of maintaining an indigenous language from an insider’s perspective and to discover what allows the speakers of indigenous languages to maintain their native languages while living in emigration and far beyond their native communities. In particular, I use the method of autoethnography to reflect on my own thoughts, perceptions, and emotional reactions regarding my language use practices.

Looking at the broader context, it could be said that personal networks play an important role in transmitting different language practices as well as in giving new values and positive meanings to practices that had negative traits earlier. One of the main factors that influenced my language choice was my personal network of people who made a similar choice in communicating with their children while living abroad. One of the main characteristics of these individuals is higher education and subsequent international contacts with Finno-Ugric educational institutions and cultural organizations. I believe that such international Finno-Ugric cooperation allowed them to perceive their native language and culture differently. In this context, these languages became valuable against the backdrop of the discriminatory policies of the Soviet Union. This phenomenon is more typical of people who went through higher education in the 1990s and early 2000s. From my observations, the situation changed when it was people born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, who grew up in a more Udmurt-positive environment, who now became parents.

Another factor is the use of the language in a different, non-traditional environment and community. In my case, it is the use of the language while living in Finland. In an environment where there are historically developed negative attitudes towards the use of the indigenous Udmurt language, e.g., in urban or “non-Udmurt” settings in Izhevsk, the use of the language creates a sense of danger for speakers. However, using the language in an environment where such attitudes do not exist does not cause the same emotional tension. Another example is Bashkortostan, where positive attitudes towards multilingual practices contribute to better preservation of the Udmurt language among Udmurts living in the Republic of Bashkortostan.

Nevertheless, negative attitudes towards the language within the linguistic community, included negative reactions to mixed or ‘incorrect’ language usefrom both indigenous speakers and speakers of the dominant language, consciously and unconsciously absorbed from early childhood by indigenous people, can cause linguistic trauma and lead to unconscious unhealthy emotional and physical reactions later in life when speaking the language, e.g., with children. This can happen whether one lives in the traditional environment or outside traditional community. This is also why many parents refuse to pass the language on to their children, as they want to protect their children from such experiences. This fact means that in the process of transmitting and preserving an indigenous language, psychological work on negative attitudes and emotional burdens, which many indigenous language speakers carry, plays an important role alongside sociolinguistic education. Such work can be carried out within the framework of cultural or collective trauma, as defined by Alexander (2004, 2010), in particular, through collective efforts to reconsider and change negative language attitudes and monolingual ideologies among the entire population of the Udmurt Republic.

As Ellis et al. (2011, pp. 25–27) note, another effective way to ease the emotional burden is writing, which has a therapeutic effect not only for a writer but also for readers. In particular, writing can give a voice to underrepresented indigenous speakers and restore subjectivity. This is evident in my blog writing. Additionally, writing helps me to develop my native language, practice different styles of the Udmurt language, and enrich myself spiritually.

Finally, the support of my family, husband, and children is the main factor that allows me to preserve my native language anywhere in the world and helps me overcome any difficulties.

Sociolinguistic and emotional–psychological education in the process of preserving indigenous languages is highly relevant in the context of Russia’s languages and peoples. In this article, I describe how the Udmurt language serves as a trigger for feelings such as fear and shame, which were formed due to the negative attitudes toward the Udmurt language in the public space of Izhevsk and the Udmurt Republic. This region and the Udmurts are not unique in facing these challenges. Other representatives of Russia’s indigenous peoples have also expressed their negative experiences concerning the usage of their native languages (Rasuleva 2024; Neseine 2024; Bolshakova 2024). This issue affects the peoples and languages throughout Russia, making it a problem for Russian society as a whole. Many negative linguistic attitudes towards non-Russian peoples and languages in contemporary Russia can be traced back to the language and ethnic policies of the Soviet Union, which are still insufficiently studied (Alpatov 2000; Zamyatin 2022; Edygarova 2024a). It is now important to rethink this experience and develop a decolonial movement throughout Russian society. Decolonial writing is one of the important measures in this process.