Speaker
Description
Kalmyk language (Oirat, Mongolic) is a minoritised language spoken in the Republic of Kalmykia. Over several generations, the linguistic situation has changed drastically due to shifting language and ethnic policies. In the twentieth century, there were periods of state support for Kalmyk and Kalmyk-medium education, as well as periods of repression, including the forced deportation of the Kalmyk population to Siberia in 1943–1956 (Guchinova 2005). These events led to disruptions in intergenerational language transmission within many families.
These socio-political changes significantly affected the multilingual repertoires of Kalmyk speakers, including the widespread acquisition of Russian, processes of language shift, and, in recent decades, partial revitalisation of Kalmyk. This has resulted in new configurations of L1 and L2, varying levels of proficiency in both languages, and diverse multilingual practices in public and private communication across generations.
The data consist of individual biographical narratives documenting language change across the lifespan of bilingual speakers in Kalmykia. The corpus was collected in both Kalmyk and Russian; for some speakers, narratives are available in both languages, while others chose to speak either Kalmyk or Russian. (The Kalmyk-language part was published within the INEL language documentation project in 2025.) This corpus makes it possible to analyse linguistic biographies, language choices, and language use among Kalmyks.
The paper addresses two main research questions: (1) What types of multilingual patterns have existed and continue to exist across different generations of Kalmyks? (2) How do language prestige and language attitudes influence language practices?
Drawing on the concept of the multilingual speaker’s repertoire (Busch 2017) and a dynamic understanding of language use, the linguistic biography approach reveals individual transition points in speakers’ trajectories. In ‘new speakers’ studies, these biographical junctures are referred to as mudes, which influence language acquisition and language practices (Pujolar 2019).
The results identify key linguistic transition points (mudes) across generations of Kalmyk speakers. One major finding is the strong individual agency of the younger generation in maintaining Kalmyk and expanding its domains of use. The linguistic analysis demonstrates generational changes in language use in both Kalmyk and Russian. The revitalising language community should therefore be understood as a continuum of speakers with varying levels of competence and diverse sources of language exposure.
References
Busch, B. (2017). Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic Repertoire: On the Concept of Spracherleben – T he Lived Experience of Language. Applied Linguistics 38/3: 340–358.
Guchinova, E.-B. (2005). “Pomnit' nel'zja zabyt'”: Antropologija deportacionnoj travmy kalmykov. [‘Remember or Forget’. An anthropology of the trauma of deportation among Kalmyks], Munich, Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag.
INEL 2025 - Baranova, V. (2025). INEL Kalmyk Corpus. Archived at Universität Hamburg. Version 1.0. Publication date 2025-07-17. https://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0007-FFB1-2. Archived at Universität Hamburg. In: The INEL Corpora of Indigenous Northern Eurasian.
Pujolar, J. (2019). Linguistic mudes: An exploration over the linguistic constitution of subjects. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 257, 165-189.