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in a schoolchild’s information environment (advertising, entertainment,
games, extracurricular activities, mass media, the Internet, etc.).
And at the tertiary stage, exposure to one’s mother tongue in small language
communities is often reduced to a bare minimum.
Possible Conclusions
As the basic speech and language skills are developed at the preschool stage,
when children are still too dependent to make their own decisions, it is necessary
to convince parents of the importance of passing mother-tongue knowledge on
to their offspring – for him or her to grow into a wholesome personality and a
community member competitive enough and resistant to harmful influences.
It is necessary to provide every kind of support for native language learning at
preschool education establishments, opening new, modern nursery schools and
kindergartens.
The right to study one’s native language and in one’s native language must
also be ensured in primary and secondary education. There is a need to create
an appropriate native language environment and to provide ample supply of
various type of content in the language.
Yakut Language: Current Situation
To better understand what should be done to expand the Yakut language’s
functional scope, let us try to overview its present-day status. Yakut is better
off than many other minority languages spoken in Russia.
It is not that the Yakut have numerical superiority over fellow non-Russian
communities. But unlike other indigenous groups, many of the Sakha people
not only speak their language, but write in it, as well.
This creates a demand for Yakut-speaking journalists and authors while
also ensuring wide enough circulation for Yakut-language print media, large
audiences for electronic media, and relatively high book publishing numbers.
Basically, the Yakut language owes its high profile in modern-day community
life to the prominence given to it on the school curriculum.
But despite the broad circulation of Yakut periodicals (the newspaper Kyym,
according to statistics from Russia’s National Circulation Service, in 2009
set a record among the non-Russian newspapers, outstripping periodicals in
Tatar, Bashkir and other minority languages) and the high number of young
authors writing in Yakut (at last year’s 17 th young writing talent conference,
the auditorium was packed beyond capacity), we should not let ourselves
become complacent. If, making the most of today’s level of ICT development,
it is not put on a par with functionally more advanced languages, but continues
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