John writes:
I read that the ancestors of modern day Aboriginal Canadians/Americans still live in parts of Siberia but they are fading away linguistically and culturally due to Russian culture, do you know anything about this? I know that the indigenous people of Russia were all Mongoloid and Siberia was all Mongoloid type people before the Russians came. So how is it that Russia is not causing harm to these cultures?
Russia has a pretty progressive attitude towards these folks. None of them are separatists, so there is not much to worry about. Russia doesn’t settle it with Russians because no Russian wants to go live in Siberia. I suspect they might even let some of these groups separate because I am not sure how much Russia cares about all these frozen wastes.
I just wrote a huge paper on these groups that will appear soon in a new book.
Russia lets all of these groups use their languages as much as they want to. They can study them in schools, or they can even use them as a medium for instruction as long as kids end up fluent in Russian too. They can declare one or more of their languages as official state languages alongside Russian. They can use the language alongside Russian in government and universities. They can have newspapers, magazines, TV and radio in their languages. The USSR supported language rights, and the new Russia has more or less inherited that mindset.
Quite a few of even the small groups related to Amerindians still speak their languages. For instance, the Altai languages are still widely spoken. Children are still being raised as native speakers in some of these languages. However, many are on their way out with most speakers age 40+. Some languages have only elderly speakers and are moribund.
Speakers of these languages often suffer from lack of funds for learning materials in the schools, and their media productions either lack funding or tend to get shut down due to financial issues.