NEWS may be thin in Ufa, capital of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, but there are plenty of languages in which to report it. All the town-centre kiosks carry local newspapers published daily and weekly in Russian, Tatar and Bashkir. There are papers in Mari and Chuvash too, though you may have to ask around a bit for them. And that, by comparison with some other republics, is a modest haul. Imagine the problems of keeping up with events in Dagestan, a republic in the north Caucasus: 2m people there share 28 languages, though 14 of them are unwritten.

The resurgence of regional autonomy and regional identity in post-communist Russia has meant a burst of new vigour for the “national” languages of Russia's 21 “ethnic” republics--a count which, for the moment, includes Chechnya. All (save the Chechens, who have declared independence) claim a measure of sovereignty within the federation. Most have given official status to a main local tongue, reversing, for these few languages at least, a remorseless decline in favour of Russian that was accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Tatarstan, next door to Bashkortostan, parliament has nodded through the first reading of a bill that would go a step further, reintroducing Latin script for Tatar. Along with many other national languages, it underwent a series of transformations in the hands of Soviet linguists: Arabic script was deposed in favour of the Latin alphabet in the 1920s, followed by a switch to Cyrillic in 1939. The Republic of Buriatia, by Lake Baikal, has been ruminating for the past year or two about jumping back a century and restoring Old Mongol lettering used for Buriat in pre-communist days. A congress of Buriat peoples this month may give the project a fresh shove.

Stalin's imposition of the Cyrillic alphabet across the Soviet Union was meant to nudge speakers of other languages towards Russian. Republics that abandon Cyrillic in the future may advance technical arguments for doing so, but the political signal will be clear enough. A move away from Cyrillic would confirm Tatarstan's standing as the most independent-minded republic in the Russian Federation (save always for separatist Chechnya). Tatarstan refused to sign the federation treaty until Russia had conceded to the republic a large measure of local sovereignty, particularly in fiscal matters. Lately it has been talking about drafting legislation to create a formal Tatar
citizenship.

National-language questions are never likely to present a systemic threat to the integrity of the Russian Federation, as they did to that of the Soviet Union when it started to weaken. The republics account for a mere 16% of Russia's population, and in most of them Russian-speakers form a majority. That adds up to an overwhelming dominance for Russian across the federation. It is the language commonly spoken at home by 90% of people—whatever their ethnic origin—within Russia and is the working language for almost as many.

The acute problems posed by the minority languages tend rather to be ones of weakness, not of strength. Of the 175 or so languages that are recorded across the entire Russian Federation, about half a dozen are close to death, and at least a dozen more are on the danger list. Those closest to extinction include Vod, a Baltic tongue; Yugh, spoken in western Siberia; Kerek, spoken on the Kamchatka peninsula; and Aleut, a language of the far north-east.

Wag those tongues

Whereas the main threat to non-Russian languages was once too much interference from government, now it I too little. State aid to remote communities has collapsed, along with regulation of the wilderness to keep miners, loggers and poachers at bay. Linguists who studied the Ket, a north-west Siberian people, found in 1993 that only half the 1,000 or so Ket could speak their own language competently, down from three-quarters in 1970. Since then, increasing poverty has made the Ket ever easier prey for traders who fly over the taiga in helicopters, carrying crates of cheap vodka to swap for furs and Siberian sturgeon. Village life has collapsed. Starvation beckons.

For the ethnic republics, the question is one of finding the right balance between national languages and Russian. In the few republics where the titular “nation” is in a clear majority--Tuva, for example--Russian can confidently be assigned a secondary role. In Bashkortostan, by contrast, the situation is unusually delicate: Bashkirs account for only about 22% of the republic's 4m people, whereas Tatars account for 28%, and Russians 39%. Giving a privileged place to the Bashkir language might upset Tatars as much as Russians. The sole nod to Bashkir in the republic's constitution is a clause requiring the president to be a Bashkir-speaker. That leaves Russian, by default, the republic's sole official language--a situation some Bashkirs think due for change.

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