Close Relatives and Outsiders: Village People in the City of Yakutsk, Siberia

Relocation Redux: Labrador Inuit Population Movements and Inequalities in the Land Claims Era

“…Most indigenous people in the villages and in the cities strongly support the relations with their tundra or taiga relatives. It means the exchange of goods, hosting, sending children to the tundra for summer vacation, and so on (Argounova-Low 2007). Both political activists and ordinary people do this (Balzer 2016).…”

State of Uncertainty

“…He added that the college regularly faced the problem that students preferred to return home after graduation, 77 despite diminished economic prospects in rural areas and a tendency toward rural exodus. 78 Moreover, there was a preference for work in familiar sectors over a career on the railroad. 79 Th e teachers, as well as the college director, claimed that for their students it was hard to accept a career in the transportation industry, as their parents and grandparents had pursued other professions, although the college tried to convince them to pursue careers in the transportation industry.…”

Code‐Mixing among Sakha–Russian Bilinguals in Yakutsk: A Spectrum of Features and Shifting Indexical Fields

“…The official metalinguistic discourses surrounding Sakha assert that it is a beautiful, poetic language and emphasize its connections to verbal art (Ferguson ). Meanwhile, there is a growing abundance of Sakha‐speakers in Yakutsk due to in‐migration from villages in the region; by 2007, this was occurring at a rate 4.5 times higher than the number of Russians arriving from other parts of Russia (Argounova‐Low ). Most speakers from the villages, while bilingual, are Sakha‐dominant, and they no longer face repression or censorship of their linguistic practices as they did in Soviet times.…”

“…It may be valued less by an urban‐oriented interlocutor, for example, in which case, using it may create social distance. Despite the overall high regard for “pure” and “authentic” Sakha speech that is claimed by many, ideologies that cast rural Sakha‐speakers as backward and unsophisticated still persist, upholding older notions of Russian as the language of progress and modernity and regional languages as impediments to the aforementioned “union of peoples.” These older but persistent ideological perspectives also shape the current social aesthetic; many Sakha have unfavorable views of rural migrants to the city even as they simultaneously value the villages as the source of their “authentic” culture (Argounova‐Low ).…”