Endangered Language essays

Endangered Language essays Ingrian, one of the languages of Russia, is an endangered language. When a language is classified as "endangered" it means that the language is in danger of extinction. Languages become extinct for a variety of reasons, but the most typical one is that it is no longer spoken by a majority of people in a culture or nation. Because of this its value is undermined, it is seldom taught to subsequent generations, and it eventually dies out with the few remaining individuals who can speak it. Ingrian is such a language. Ingrian is one of the smaller Finnic languages Ingria is located at the westernmost part of Russia, on the south beach of Finnish Gold of Baltic Sear, near Saint Petersburg (Agranat 2002). While a culture known as the Votes inhabited the region that is Ingria before Ingrians, with the arrival of the Ingrians in the sixteenth century. After the peace treaties of Stolbovo and Karde, Finnish peasants moved to north and central Ingria. Because of this there are Ingrians and Ingrian Finns, but both call their common language suomen kieli (inkerin)" or Ingrian, (The Ingrians 2004, 1). There are statistics on Ingrians from the mid-19th century to contemporary times. According to census records, in 1848 there were 76,069 Ingrians in Ingria but this number declined to 16,239 by 1979, (The Ingrians 2003). Of this small number of Ingrians remaining in Ingria, only 51.9% spoke Ingrian (The Ingrians 2004). However, according to a 1989 Census conducted by Ethnologue, only 302 of the 10,000-15,000 Ingrians remaining are fluent in Ingrian, (Ingrian 2003). One of the biggest reasons for the decline of Ingrians and their language is their persecution and dispersion by the Russians. Because of the location of Ingria on the Russian-Swedish border, by the early 1900s Ingria was claimed to be historically a part of Russia. As such, the Ingrians living in Ingria at t...