A Literary Standard and Its Discontents

This chapter analyzes Buryat language standardization as an example of truncated standardization, a problem that characterizes many minority languages in postcolonial contexts. It discusses why indigenous languages like Buryat are more likely to be surrounded by a different lingua franca, such as Russian, and used between speakers of different dialects to reduce the immediate need for a standardized indigenous language. It assesses how media makers and other language elites persist in trying for standardization in an effort to create and maintain a strong literary standard as a crucial component of the Buryat modernizing project. The chapter also talks about contemporary audiences who control colloquial forms of Buryat but have a hard time understanding Buryat-language media, particularly news media. It investigates linguistic resources, such as dialects and Russian–Buryat mixed forms, that are not part of the literary standard but serve important social functions in certain contexts.

Rupture and Reclamation

This chapter looks into the legacies of the twentieth century's massive modernization efforts through the terms rupture and loss, in which contemporary Buryats predominantly understand the history of their culture, language, and land. It analyzes a series of temporal and spatiocultural disjunctures that informs of feelings during language shift. It also reviews the four-century shift from Buryat to Russian as an especially salient instance of cultural change. The chapter assesses the examples of Russification that affects everyday life and to which people refer to as a more thoroughgoing rupture. It covers the discussions of language that stand in for debates over the past and ideal future of Buryat belonging. It also highlights disagreement over what counts as speaking “real Buryat” over what it means to be a “real Buryat.”.