Welcome back to Language of the Week. I do apologise for the break, I was recovering from a flare-up. This “season”, as it were, will discuss minority languages, especially those pressed between multiple cultural forces. So, evidently, we find ourselves turning to Crimean Tatar, a language spoken by an ethnic group of the same name inhabiting 7 separate countries in the former USSR.

The basics

Crimean Tatar, or Crimean, is a Turkic language spoken primarily in Crimea, de jure part of Ukraine, but operating as a de facto Russian republic since the 2014 Crimean War. Ethnic Crimeans have faced an extremely difficult set of circumstances over the past few centuries, starting with a “de-Tatarisation” effort after Russia annexed Crimea for the first of many times in the 1780s, attempting to push them out of the region.

Later, a cultural genocide carried out by Soviet authorities in 1944 led to over 190,000 people being deported to much of the Black Sea and Central Asia. After the deportation, the language faced an official ban in the USSR, which strongly suppressed the free practice of Crimean customs and culture. The language is considered critically endangered by some experts, and its extinction is looking unfortunately likely in the coming generations.

Writing under a Khan, a Czar, and a General Secretary

This series has discussed before how writing systems are often used as a political tool to define a language’s identity. This is perhaps most clear with the post-Soviet Turkic languages, which have in the last hundred years changed writing systems multiple times according to the whims of whoever was in power.

Historically, Crimean Tatar (along with the the other Turkic languages) was written in the Arabic script, reflecting the cultural and religious link between the Turkic peoples and the Arab world. This changed quite suddenly throughout the Turkic world following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the West and the Soviet Union expanding across much of Asia in the East, with the adoption of Latin sweeping almost the entire language family (outside of some communities in China).

In the case of the now Soviet Crimeans, a modified version of the “Yañalif” New Turkic Alphabet was selected by officials, purportedly in an attempt to boost literacy. This push towards Latin throughout the bloc was short-lived, however, and within a decade a semi-bespoke Cyrillic script was instated, closely resembling scripts used for other Turkic languages in the USSR at the time such as Azeri or Turkmen.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, attempts were made to standardise the Turkic languages’ writing systems into a so-called Common Turkic Alphabet. However, this has not been realised in Crimea as following the Crimean War, the Russian authorities have banned the use of non-Cyrillic scripts for “languages of Russia”.

Ukraine, on the other hand, is attempting to push forward with the Common Turkic Alphabet proposals despite not currently controlling any Crimean-speaking territory. This creates an interesting split where communities within Crimea are mostly continuing to write in the mandatory Cyrillic script, but communities elsewhere, especially in Romania and Turkey, are using Latin to culturally position themselves closer to Turkey and Ukraine.

Dwindling

Crimean Tatar is now spoken by just 60,000 people—about a medium sized town’s worth. While there exist revitalisation efforts, continued cultural repression in the cultural heartland make the language’s future highly uncertain.

Russia has a delicate relationship to minority languages it controls, and generally will not take many steps to ensure the existence of minority languages and identities, which are often seen as going against the Russian ideal of “the Russian people”. While the language has official status in Crimea, in practicality that status remains mostly nominal, with Russian strongly preferred by the establishment.

The Ukrainian government has been far more active in attempting to defend the language, granting Crimean “protected status” and allowing citizens to receive government documents, such as ID cards and passports, in the language. It is, however, extremely difficult to attempt to maintain a language when all communities speaking it are out of one’s control.

Diaspora communities also exist in Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, and Uzbekistan, writing books and singing songs—engaging in their culture. But, diaspora can only hold onto a language in the face of the cultural dominance of their countries’ own languages for so long. With each new generation, the edges of a language are sanded down a little more, its vocabulary frays, and its importance is diluted. Little by little, the language just… stops existing.

However, the fight is not yet lost. Languages like Hebrew and Cornish have been revived with far fewer resources and far fewer speakers than Crimean Tatar has today—Crimean actually has relatively healthy margins and an extremely engaged community, as far as endangered languages go. The best thing about language is that it isn’t intrinsic; you can learn it for any reason, at any time, just by engaging with it. Revitalisation is not a futile endeavor, and there is room to rekindle the flame that the diaspora and home communities have been carrying for centuries.

The language that survived a Khan, a Czar, and a General Secretary is not going out without a fight.