An interview with Üzebez’s Aisin
Saturday, February 13th, 2010APN recently featured an interview with Ruslan Aisin, the man behind some prominent campaigns for the Tatar language, such as making Tatar the second official language of Russia (see a video report at Youtube). I have translated the interview hastily into English.
Aisin’s activism is inspiring, but I do not think it can serve as a model for Russia’s other minorities. Only in Kazan’ do you have young Tatars settling and forming this urban minority class. It’s a fairly decent city to live in. In Mari El, young people often go migrate from the villages straight to Moscow or St. Petersburg. The Mari that settle in Yoshkar-Ola don’t seem of sufficient numbers to implement more use of Mari in the city. The more I observe minorities in Russia, the more everything seems to be about demographics, with high birthrates a reason for optimism, but the collapsed economies of provincial Russia are pushing everyone to emigrate with disastrous consequences for language preservation.