Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the mobility of language among Sakha-Russian bilinguals in urban spaces. This is done through investigating how the symbolic notions of urbanity vs. rurality and linguistic hybridity vs. purity play out within the output of young Sakha creatives in the city of Yakutsk.

Paper long abstract:

During the Soviet period, speaking the Sakha language in public spaces in Yakutsk, Russia indexed what was sometimes deemed "ethnic chauvinism" or "natsionalizm" by Russian monolinguals and other non-speakers of Sakha-or, at other times, more simply a sign of undesirable backwardness and the antithesis to Soviet progress. Since the late 1980s, however, there has been a slow but powerful transformation of linguistic ideologies and a resultant increase of Sakha used within urban public spaces. This paper examines the mobility and movement of language among Sakha-Russian bilinguals speakers, shedding light on the factors that help to maintain the Sakha language in the city. Through investigating how the symbolic notions of urbanity vs. rurality and linguistic hybridity vs. linguistic purity play out within the creative output of young Sakha musicians, comedians, and students in the city of Yakutsk, I analyze the sometimes contradictory ideologies, values and attitudes that help to support Sakha linguistic vitality in an urban space still dominated by Russian. I trace the circulation of these creative words, suggesting that these videos—in their words and images—are metaphorical "Third Spaces" (Bhabha 1994), or what Russell (2006, 3) calls "a productive space […] where there is a necessity of blurring of existing boundaries and binaristic identities." This space emerges through the relocalization (Pennycook 2010) of globalized forms with the local Sakha communicative practices and related genres; through this process, meanings of urban Sakha linguistic authenticity, and thus language ideologies and linguistic forms, are negotiated.