Удмуртскоязычные социальные сети vs. валлийские социальные сети

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4 Udmurt on Social Network Sites: A Comparison with the Welsh Case

Christian Pischlöger

No noise, no improvement. Activism as such is not sufficient for improvement, but damned if it isn�t necessary

Todd Gitlin, 2003. Cited from Combs and Penfield, 2012: 461I don�t speak proper Welsh

Crystal, 2006: 10Only foreigners speak pure Udmurt

A 22-year-old male interviewee in A. Zamyatin, 2012: 25

Despite the fact that the Udmurt language is, besides Russian, an official language of the Udmurt Republic in Russia and one of the bigger languages of the Uralic language family, the language is �definitely endangered� according to UNESCO. The reasons for this are manifold: urbanisation, influence of mass media, increased mobility, weak institutional support, low prestige, etc. In recent years, predominantly urban language activists have been using social media to promote the use of Udmurt and to create an Udmurt identity in a modern environment. The colloquial tone in Udmurt groups on social network sites (SNS) like Vkontakte fosters the use of mixed language forms (�суро пожо�), otherwise frowned upon by adherents to language purism.

The role of SNS in maintaining and revitalising languages is often believed to be of considerable importance, but is still poorly investigated. Research has been carried out on, e.g. the Welsh language. Compared with the apparently normalised and widespread presence of Welsh on the internet, Udmurt on social media is still very much characterised by language activism. One possible explanation for this might be an earlier adoption of SNS by

Udmurt on Social Network Sites: A Comparison with the Welsh Case 109

IntroductionIn recent years, predominantly urban language activists have used

social network sites (SNS: this term will be used for social media and Web 2.0 alike), to promote the Udmurt language on the internet. Successfully, it would seem, as Udmurt is one of the most visible Uralic languages of the Russian Federation on SNS. Nevertheless, this phenomenon has not been the subject of research, apart from some very few initial attempts. This is not only true for Udmurt but also for other endangered Uralic and non-Uralic languages of the Russian Federation. Welsh was chosen for a comparison as it is not only a role model for language revitalisation and maintenance efforts across the globe, but it is also well researched and documented as regards usage on SNS.

The analysis of the Welsh situation rests almost exclusively on research of existing literature, whereas the findings for the Udmurt language are mainly based on own research. The chapter thus contributes to the understanding of the minority languages in new media in two different (post)modern contexts, the European Union and the Russian Federation. Moreover, the chapter aims to compare the language use of Udmurt and Welsh with regard to possible lessons not only for researchers but also for language activists who are interested in channelling their language maintenance and revitalisation efforts more economically.

The Udmurt LanguageUdmurt is a Uralic language mainly spoken by Udmurts in the

Republic of Udmurtia, but also by its neighbouring federal subjects in the Volga Region, such as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, the Perm Krai and the Kirov oblast. The rest of the Udmurt diaspora is spread over the Russian Federation; small Udmurt communities can even be found outside Russia, e.g. in Estonia. Approximately 640,000 people identified as Udmurts in the

and for the Welsh language. Nevertheless, some positive outcomes of Udmurt activities on the internet can already be observed: an increased visibility of the Udmurt language and culture, a coherence of the Udmurt (online) community (of particular importance to the Udmurt diaspora), an historically unparalleled widespread use of Udmurt as a written language and the occurrence of new genres.

110 Part 1: Language Communities or Networks of Communication?

2002 census (Russian Census, 2002), but eight years later, only 550,000 people did so (Russian Census, 2010). The ratio of ethnic Udmurts who claim to speak Udmurt has declined to an even greater extent: 464,000 (i.e. approximately 73% of those identifying as Udmurts) in 2002 as opposed to only 325,000 (approximately 59%) in 2010. Although the results of the two censuses cannot be compared directly, as the questions differed slightly and the execution of the latter census has been criticised, the decline in the use of Udmurt is undisputed. Despite still having more than 300,000 speakers, Udmurt is classified as a �definitely endangered language� by the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages (UNESCO Atlas, 2014).

According to a regional law, Udmurt is an official language of the Udmurt Republic alongside Russian. Nevertheless, its institutional support is weak and the amount of Udmurt teaching is insufficient (cf. Zamyatin [2012] on language education in the Volga and Ural region). The language is spoken by some 17% of the inhabitants of the republic, but the vast majority of Udmurt speakers are bilingual (Udmurt�Russian), some of them occasionally even polylingual (mainly Udmurt�Russian�Tatar), whereas Russian speakers have no need, and no institutional framework, to learn the Udmurt language, or to use it at work and in the public sphere in general. The functional domains of the Udmurt language are mostly restricted to the family, traditional life in the countryside and agriculture. Russian is the language of administration, public life, mass media, schools, modern technology, etc. (cf. Winkler, 2011: 14). In urban areas, in the capital Izhevsk in particular, the Udmurt language is being increasingly displaced by Russian, which in general enjoys greater prestige (for the development of ethnic and linguistic belonging, cf. Table 4.1).

Two recent PhD theses investigating the present-day situation of the Udmurt language (Salánki, 2007; Shirobokova, 2011a � both theses are unpublished but available via the internet through the dissertation database of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest) showed that there are significant generational differences: the younger the interviewee, the

Table 4.1 Development of ethnic and linguistic belonging

Year of census

Ethnic Udmurts

Udmurt speakers as a percentage of total

1926 504,200 99.1

1959 624,794 89.1

1979 713,696 76.5

1989 746,793 69.9

2002 636,906 72.8

2010 550,000 59.0

Sources: Salánki (2007: 26); Russian Census (2010).


better the knowledge of Russian and the poorer the knowledge of Udmurt. The drastic decline in the number of speakers by an absolute number of 140,000 over only eight years between censuses cannot be explained by demographic processes alone. One reason might be that knowledge of Udmurt offers no advantage or even implies (possibly only perceived) disadvantages; another reason might be that many Udmurts have a low self-estimation of their knowledge of Udmurt due to widespread puristic and prescriptive language ideologies (cf. Edygarova in this volume).

Udmurt Language Purism

Между собой на удмуртском. Ну, такой разговорный у нас язык-то удмуртский. На чистом удмуртском разговаривают только иностранцы. Такой у нас язык-то удмуртский, он вперемешку с русским. Ну, в речи там и удмуртские слова, сразу русские слова. [...] А на чистом удмуртском... ну, скажем иностранец там, финн там, поляки учат, вот с ними разговариваешь уже. Они на таком чистом удмуртском разговаривают, они вообще русского не знают. И приходится им на чистом удмуртском как-то изъясняться и как-то стыдно с ними разговаривать на там... не понимают они разговорного (Замятин, 2012: 25)

Among ourselves we speak in Udmurt. Well, the Udmurt we use is so colloquial. Only foreigners speak pure Udmurt. Our Udmurt is mixed with Russian. Well, in our speech there are Udmurt words, and immediately after that Russian words. [...] Pure Udmurt is only learned, let�s say, by Finnish or Polish people, and you talk with them. They speak such pure Udmurt, they don�t know Russian at all. One is obliged to make oneself understandable somehow in pure Udmurt and it is somehow embarrassing to talk with them in that... colloquial speech they don�t understand. (A 22-year-old male interviewee in Zamyatin [2012: 25]; translation from Russian by the author)

When I took part in the Summer Course of Udmurt Language and Culture in Udmurtia in 2012 for the first time after many years, I heard statements of this kind from students of the Department of Udmurt Philology who accompanied us in our leisure time programme and helped us with bureaucracy. I was told that only we foreigners learn �pure Udmurt� (Udm. чылкыт удмурт), whereas they themselves speak �only� a �mixture� of languages (Udm. суро-пожо �blending, mixture, potpourri; mixed�). This was at the very beginning of the summer course. At the end of our stay, we, the �students from abroad�, were asked by the dean of the Department of Udmurt Philology to speak in front of prospective students in order to motivate them and to show that it is worthwhile to study Udmurt.


The statements regarding the �pureness� of the Udmurt language are an expression of prescriptive, puristic language attitudes, which are typical of the linguistic culture in Russia and lead speakers of heritage languages to think that their language use and even their languages themselves are not �pure�, and that they thus do not speak �properly�, especially in comparison with the ubiquitous Russian language. The dean�s request is an indication of the low prestige the Udmurt language has even among young Udmurt native speakers preparing to study their mother tongue on an academic level at university.

Language purism in lesser-spoken languages is neither a new phenomenon nor is it restricted to Udmurt or other languages in the Russian Federation. It is not even restricted to endangered languages. Rather, it can be found in, e.g. English, French, Spanish and �in any speech community� (Crystal, 2006: 9) across the world. Its danger or at least possibly negative implications for the revitalisation of endangered languages are described in scholarly literature (cf. e.g. Crystal, 2003, 2004, 2006; Dorian, 1994).

Although language purism or �prescriptivism� (cf. e.g. Crystal, 2003: 96; 2004: 63, 66, 73�74, 76�77, 79) is not restricted to Russia, Russia belongs to a �standard language culture� (Milroy, 2001) in which there �[...] is the view that one variety of language has an inherently higher value than others, and that this ought to be imposed on the whole of the speech community� (Crystal, 2004: 63). This attitude is true particularly for the Russian language, but these ideas and standards are transferred by philologists and speakers of Udmurt and other minority languages in Russia to their own language(s).

Another reason for this puristic view could be that � in the case of Udmurt � philologists and language activists in particular try to retain �the integrity and distinctiveness of the nation� (Wertheim, 2002: 26) via the language, as is the case, e.g. for Tatar (cf. Wertheim, 2002, 2003). This becomes particularly obvious on the lexicological level, as (at least supposed) Russian loanwords are affected by attempts to �purify� the language. Loanwords of other origin (e.g. Tatar) are not targets of these efforts and often are not even recognised as loanwords (especially, of course, by non-philologists). On the contrary, Turkic loans (булгариские и татарские слова, i.e. �Bulgar and Tatar words�; Nasibullin, 2012: 76) are even used by the �terminological-orthographic commission� (термино-офрографическая коммиссия) to create neologisms (Nasibullin, 2012). It has been argued that, in the neighbouring Tatar context, the �implicit goal� of purism is to make Tatar �maximally distinct from Russian� (Wertheim, 2003: 350), and one could assume that this is also true for Udmurt.

According to Svetlana Yedygarova (2013: 16; cf. also Edygarova in this volume), the general conception of modern Udmurt is that of a �standardised language� (in Russian, нормированный язык; Yedygarova, 2013: 7), which can be found in �good fiction literature, in newspapers


and magazines, as well as in the oral speech of Udmurt intellectuals�. This type of language is regarded as �correct�, �pure� and �genuine� (правильный, чистый, настоящий; Yedygarova, 2013) Udmurt. Only two varieties of the Udmurt language � the standardised language and traditional dialects, regarded as �primordial Udmurt� (исконно удмуртский; Yedygarova, 2013) � invoke the interest of scholars and have a place in the curricula of schools and universities. However, due to insufficient teaching, a limited amount of media input and lack of practice, most native Udmurt speakers do not master the standardised language. According to one estimate, only about 7% of speakers do so (Yedygarova, 2013: 16). Instead of this prestigious variety or traditional dialects, they speak language varieties considered not correct or pure due to the Russian influence on morphology, syntax and lexis. However, this language variety is frowned upon in a written context, and criticised or ignored by Udmurt intellectuals (Yedygarova, 2013: 7). Due to these attitudes, these forms are used mainly orally, but occasionally they can also occur in written contexts, e.g. letters, notes, text messages, emails and on the internet in general (Edygarova, 2014: 386). Some of these criticised, low-prestige mixed language forms have recently also appeared in the modern literary works of Darali Leli and Bogdan Anfinogenov. Some professional Udmurt philologists describe this as �language hooliganism� (языковое хулиганство) (Yedygarova, 2013: 13).

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that there are traditional Udmurt philologists who criticise puristic tendencies, or at least the creation of �Udmurt� neologisms at the cost of Russian borrowings at the lexical level by the Udmurt terminological-orthographic commission (Ru. термино-офрографическая коммиссия) (cf. Nasibullin, 2012). According to Nasibullin (2012), these neologisms are often created using a flawed methodology as regards grammar and semantics. A consequence of Udmurt linguistic purism has been a split down the middle of Udmurt society: the general population which does not use or recognise purisms on the one side, and a �small bunch of Udmurt intellectuals, using purisms� on the other (Nasibullin, 2012: 76�77).

This language purism is not only common among traditional Udmurt philologists, but also among the Web 2.0 activists. One activist sometimes refers to philologists ironically as �suffixologists� (Ru. суффиксоведы) in order to allude to the uselessness, in the eyes of activists, of traditional Udmurt linguistics with regard to the maintenance and revitalisation of Udmurt. Nevertheless, language activists have led several campaigns to e.g. motivate the creation of neologisms (Udm. малпа выль кыл �Create a new word�; cf. Malpa vyl� kyl, 2014) or organise a crowd-sourced translation of the interface of VKontakte (Ru. в контакте �in contact�), a Russian counterpart of Facebook, into Udmurt. This collective effort took about three years (Pischlöger, 2014b: 149�150), but the Udmurt interface is used by only roughly 150 people (personal correspondence with Aleksey


Shklyayev, a language activist, with data stemming from 2013; recent numbers are not available. My interviews with Udmurt activists seem to confirm the limited usage. Even those who worked on the interface often do not use it and prefer the Russian one). One reason why the interface is little used by the language community might be the incomprehensibility of some of its terminology. Another reason could be that the need for an interface in Udmurt was not even perceived since the existing version in Russian was considered sufficient for the, as a rule, bilingual Udmurt users of VKontakte (this opinion was expressed by an Udmurt journalist in an interview in which I took part).

Actions like these are very time- and resource-consuming, but often show relatively little effect, e.g. the linguistic influence of an interface of a social media resource in a minority language does not seem to exceed the boundaries of the activist groups and the use of some lexical borrowings (Carroll, 2008: 14).

The Udmurt Language on Web 2.0Although the potential role of the internet in supporting the maintenance

of the Udmurt language is mentioned by some authors (e.g. Salánki, 2007: 66; Shirobokova, 2011a: 301, 313; 2011b: 72), only a few studies have been conducted in this field (Shirobokova, 2011a: 67�71, 174; 2011b: 301�305; Pischlöger, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2014a, 2014b). The lack of research on the internet�s role in maintaining the Udmurt language might be explained by the prescriptive and puristic attitudes mentioned earlier, which have led to an almost exclusive scholarly interest in �archaic� and �pure� dialects on the one hand, as well as in the standardised modern literary language on the other. This section is an attempt to give a brief outline of the beginnings and the recent situation of the Udmurt internet, with a focus on SNS.

The beginning of the Udmurt internet is connected with the activities of Denis Sakharnykh and his website �Udmurtology� (Ru./Udm. Удмуртология), launched in 2002. This site can still be found on the internet (Udmurtology, 2014), but it has not been updated since 2 January 2011; it serves as a kind of �documentation centre� for the Udmurt Web 1.0. It offers links to the first Udmurt internet appearances, some of which do not function anymore, e.g. that of the Petrov brothers (http://udmurtportal.info), also belonging to the pioneers of the Udmurt internet. Reportedly, at least one of the brothers has died from myopathy. The Petrov brothers ran, among other sites with Udmurt content, a (Russian language) site on this disease (http://miopatia.narod.ru). Further, Sakharnykh�s site presents Udmurt fonts, Udmurt keyboard layouts, etc. This site is a typical representation of Web 1.0, still very much in the style of publishing a personal website with almost no possibility for interaction. Sakharnykh�s only recent involvement in Udmurt-language-related activities on SNS


is his function as one of three administrators of the Udmurt Wikipedia (Pischlöger, 2014b: 149).

It was also Denis Sakharnykh who on 9 November 2007 gave the first comment, a welcome greeting in Udmurt, Tatar and Russian (Ӟечбуресь ваньды!/Əссəламегалəйкем!/Всем привет!: http://vk.com/udmort?w=wall-644235_1) on the wall of a newly founded group on VKontakte called Udmurtlyk (Udm. Udmurtlyk �Udmurtness�) (Udmurtlyk, 2014). Since then, this group has developed into the largest (with over 9000 members as of 30 November 2014) and probably most influential and important group of the Udmurt internet. The slogan of the group �Beneficial. For our own people� (Udm. Пайдаен. Асьме калыклы) reflects its programme: the promotion and popularisation of the Udmurt language and culture. The group is administered by a changing team of Web 2.0 activists working independently from one another. One of these is Pavel Pozdeyev, probably the best-known Udmurt (internet) activist at present.

In March 2008, Pozdeyev and Aleksandr Yegorov founded the Yumshan promo group (Yumshan in Udm. юмшан �festivity, party�), a collective of activists operating in the social media. In addition to the aforementioned group Udmurtlyk, Pozdeyev, together with fellow activists, operates more than 10 social media channels under the name Yumshan: several blogs, groups on VKontakte and Facebook, video channels on YouTube and Vimeo, accounts on Twitter, Instagram, etc. His greatest success is presumably the promotion of the ensemble Buranovskiye Babushki (�Buranovo Grannies�, in Udmurt Брангуртысь песянайёс), which consists of singing Udmurt grandmothers from the village of Buranovo (cf. Figure 4.1). The group won the Russian national selection of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012 and finished second at the final event in Baku. Their song �Party for Everybody� was sung in Udmurt; only the refrain was in English, which might have been a pragmatic concession to the international audience. For the first time in history, a broader public on a Russian and even international level heard of the existence of a minority people living in Russia and speaking a Uralic language. This success was not least based on the viral distribution of the song via SNS and video channels like YouTube (cf. Pischlöger, 2014b: 146). Achievements such as this, and the strong presence of Udmurt in comparison with the other Uralic languages on SNS, make Udmurt, at least seemingly, a �very vital [language] in individual groups and on individual pages� on Web 2.0 (Cagnoli, 2012: 18). A closer look at some numbers, however, tells another story. The extensive Udmurt and Udmurt-related traffic on SNS is created by a few disproportionately highly active users who, as a rule, are urban language activists, journalists and/or Web 2.0 aficionados. Twitter might serve as a typical example: about two thirds of relevant tweets are produced by only one person (April 2014, see also Figure 4.2).

The greatest numbers of members are found in groups like Udmurtlyk and Yumshan on VKontakte, which together with the SNS Odnoklassniki


(�classmates�) makes up the largest playground for the Udmurt language on the internet. Overall, there were only about 90 Udmurt or Udmurt-related groups (December 2013) on VKontakte, and by no means were all of them active. In contrast to this, Welsh had 236 �Welsh-language�-coded groups on Facebook in 2008 (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 243). The median number of members and postings in the groups on VKontakte was clearly below the mean, which also can be seen as an indicator that a disproportionately high level of traffic and activity is created by only a few highly active users and groups. The same rule applies for blogs: of about 60 blogs, only a handful of blogs are updated on a regular basis. Many blogs have seemingly only been established by people wishing to take part in blogging competitions, initiated by internet activists, but as soon as the competitions were over, some of the blogs became inactive (Pischlöger, 2014b: 147�148).

Nevertheless, a small Udmurt blogosphere has developed in recent years, consisting of 5 to 10 blogs updated on a regular basis. What is new about these blogs is that they are �real� blogs, i.e. personal online diaries

Figure 4.1 The most successful product of the Udmurt internet is the ensemble Buranovskiye Babushki, a group consisting of singing Udmurt grandmothers from the village of Buranovo. They won the Russian national selection of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012 and fi nished second at the fi nal event in Baku with their song ‘Party for Everybody’, sung in Udmurt with only the refrain in English. This success was not insignifi cantly based on the viral distribution of the song via SNS and video channels like YouTube, and is connected with the name of Pavel Pozdeyev, probably the best-known Udmurt (internet) activist at present (Photo courtesy of TV and radio channel ‘Moya Udmurtiya’)


Figure 4.2 Twitter might serve as a typical example of the principle that a lot of Udmurt traffi c on SNS is created by very few activists, journalists and Web 2.0 afi cio-nados. Aleksandr Bikuzin, tweeting in his own name and also for the Udmurt language branch of the Udmurt state TV and radio station ‘Мынам Удмуртие’ (‘My Udmurtia’), is alone responsible for about two thirds of the tweets in Udmurt. On the SNS VKontakte, he is wondering in a mix of Udmurt, Russian and the so-called ‘Padonkaffsky jargon’ (or also ‘Olbanian’; cf. Kronhaus [2013]. The latter is a kind of internet slang, created by a subculture of the Russian internet. Typical of this type of slang is, e.g. a phonetic writing of Russian words. Nowadays, its use has decreased signifi cantly, but neverthe-less some Udmurt activists still use some of its features, as in the picture, e.g. the use of карочи for короче): ‘So, it seems, I am alone on Twitter... Why and for whom and what for? This is the question... so, and “what is to be done”’ (Source: Screenshot of Aleksandr Bikuzin’s VKontakte page)

in Udmurt about the everyday life of primarily young Udmurt students, not blogs focusing primarily on language or national activism. Typical examples are the blogs of Mariya Vekshina (Marajko, 2014) and Marina Sergeyeva (Udmurto4ka, 2014), but also of Alina Krestyaninova (2014), who studies sports in Kazan, or Olga Ignatyeva, an Udmurt woman married to a Hungarian and living in Germany, who describes the (also linguistic) development of their two daughters (Kepics, 2014).

The aforementioned Bogdan Anfinogenov runs several literary and musical projects on the internet and could even be regarded as the


creator of Udmurt �internet poetry� (cf. Pischlöger, 2014a). The young Tartu-based student Niko Anisimov (who performs traditional and modern Udmurt songs), Yevgeniy Bikuzin (whose graffiti has become quite well-known via social media among Western Finno-Ugric scholars as well, cf. Figure 4.3), the Udmurt State University student and singer Ivan Belosludcev, the folk rock band Garuda and the Udmurt indie rock band Silent Woo Goore (cf. Pischlöger, 2013b, 2014b: 156) are worth mentioning as well.

All of these people use SNS to express and promote themselves primarily, the promotion of the Udmurt language and culture might be considered secondary. They can be regarded as the third generation of �internet celebrities� after Web 1.0 veterans like Denis Sakharnykh, and the Web 2.0 pioneers of Udmurtlyk and Yumshan. Maybe this can be considered a sign of the beginning �normalisation� of Udmurt language use on social media, which for the Welsh language seems to have already happened (cf. Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 244).

Figure 4.3 The Udmurt language can hardly be seen in the capital of the Udmurt Republic, Izhevsk. An exception is the graffi ti of Yevgeniy Bikuzin, which has become quite well known via SNS among Western Finno-Ugric scholars as well. In the picture, we can see an ironic modifi cation of the famous (most likely misattributed) quotation of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: ‘I was in outer space, I saw God’ (Picture by the author, Ch.P.)


The Welsh Language on SNSWhile the Udmurt language, with the few exceptions mentioned above,

is still lacking qualitative and quantitative research on its presence on SNS and the internet � as is the case for other Uralic and non-Uralic languages of the Russian Federation � the research situation for the Welsh language is a lot more satisfying. When seeking relevant literature on the use of SNS for lesser-spoken heritage languages, one gets the impression that Welsh is represented quite well, if not optimally, in this respect. Several scientific studies have been conducted concerning, e.g. a general overview of social media and Welsh (Cunliffe & Harries, 2005; Cunliffe & Herring, 2005; Cunliffe & Roberts-Young, 2005), the presence of traditional mass media on the internet, i.e. Welsh language online services of BBC Wales (Davies, 2005), SNS such as Facebook and Twitter (Cunliffe et al., 2013; Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010; Johnson, 2013), blogs (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2008), video channels (Cunliffe & ap Dyfrig, 2013), etc. This list of articles is by no means complete, it serves only to illustrate that the sociolinguistic situation of Welsh on SNS is researched to a much greater extent than that of Udmurt.

In addition to the academic interest in Wales and the UK itself, the maintenance and revitalisation of Welsh through �new technologies� also evokes interest abroad, as seen for example in a PhD dissertation defended at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) (Slimane, 2008). Even outside academia, the fate of the Welsh language seems to be of interest to a broader public. This is at least suggested by some articles in (online) newspapers written on the maintenance of the Welsh language. Much research is conducted and published on the use of the internet in Wales by the National Assembly for Wales (e.g. Wilkinson, 2013) and for the UK as a whole by the Office of Communications, which has, incidentally, Welsh as an official language besides English (e.g. Ofcom, 2012, 2013). Data on the use of the Welsh language on the internet can be found in publications of the National Survey for Wales (e.g. National Survey, 2014; Whitworth et al., 2014). Some of the most remarkable studies on the use of Welsh on the internet and SNS were carried out by the Welsh market research agency, Beaufort Research Ltd., in one case commissioned by the two Welsh language broadcasters BBC Cymru/Wales and S4/C, as well as the Welsh government (Beaufort Research, 2013), and in another case by BBC Cymru/Wales, S4/C, the Welsh Language Board and the Arts Council of Wales (Beaufort Research, 2005).

One of the earlier articles on the �new media and the Welsh language� (Davies, 2005) describes the first steps of Welsh language media, i.e. BBC Cymru/Wales and S4C, on the internet. The internet at this point is not regarded as concurrent to traditional media, or even as an entirely


new communication channel, since �[n]ew media [i.e., BBC Wales� Welsh-language online services; Ch.P.] and old loyalties [�] [are] not so much colliding as co-traveling� (Davies, 2005: 15). The then-new form of presentation was especially appreciated by Welsh speakers outside Wales, i.e. in England, Patagonia and the USA, who without the new media could not have accessed the broadcasts in Welsh. Another popular bonus point, not only among Welsh-born exiles, was Welsh learning material (Davies, 2005: 15�16). In 2008, a study on �[t]he use of the Welsh language on Facebook� was conducted (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010). In this study, among other things such as personal profiles, 236 �Welsh language groups� with an average of 398 members were analysed on the basis of several criteria. The biggest group was �Tribute to Ray Gravell � Rest in Peace, Grav� with 12,973 members (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 234) and also a �large number of connections with other groups� (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 237). Ray Gravell was a former Welsh rugby player who died in October 2007. It is probably not a coincidence that the biggest Welsh language group is connected to rugby, which is considered the Welsh national sport, something I will return to later. Another interesting finding of this article is that the �fairly coherent interconnected community� (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 238) used Facebook �not only to use the Welsh language, but also to discuss the language and its future� (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 243), and demonstrated a �[v]ery early adoption of Facebook as a tool for language activism� (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 236).

The group �Tribute to Ray Gravell � Rest in Peace, Grav� also demonstrates another characteristic feature of studies on SNS: it is difficult to understand what happened in this group after the study was released, as this group, which once had 12,973 members, now has only 69 (as of 3 December 2014); the last posting was in December 2007 (Tribute to Ray Gravell, 2014). The exodus of group members was seemingly caused by spam. When trying to understand and research other groups in this (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010) and similar articles, it turned out that many of them no longer exist, or that the data are outdated. The article was first received by the journal on 17 November 2008 and the final version on 20 March 2009. The publication of the article did not happen until March 2010. This means that almost a year and a half were lost during the peer review process, which is a very long time in the short cycles of the internet. The same happened to other articles, e.g. Cagnoli (2012) (received in 2012, the issue of the journal was only published in 2014).

Cunliffe, together with two other authors, conducted another study on the �Differential Use of Welsh in Young Speaker s� Social Networks� (Cunliffe et al., 2013) five years later. Here, face-to-face communication was compared with communication through electronic texts and SNS.


A sample of 200 young people aged between 13 and 18 was chosen from four Welsh-medium secondary schools, two of them in the south-east of Wales (where Welsh has its weakest position), and two in the north-west of Wales (where the so-called Fro Gymraeg, the �Welsh heartlands�, can be found). First, an online survey with a questionnaire was conducted. Based on the survey data, focus groups were organised (Cunliffe et al., 2013: 76�78). This study revealed that, although English is most widely used for surfing the internet and is regarded as the �language of the internet�, Facebook nevertheless is a place of regular online use of the Welsh language as well (�Our Facebook is a Welsh section of the Internet, where our friends speak Welsh�) (Cunliffe et al., 2013: 85). Offline communication shows that outside of the Welsh-speaking heartlands, the use of Welsh outside of the classroom and on SNS continues to be low (Cunliffe et al., 2013: 85), though Welsh is used in the south-east as a �secret language� among school friends and for quoting humorous comments by fellow pupils during the school day (Cunliffe et al., 2013: 83).

There is a tendency towards code-switching in all four subgroups of the sample, but it seems more natural in the north-west, while Welsh words are mixed into English sentences in the south-east for, e.g. birthday wishes or greeting formulas as �symbolic markers of their Welsh identity� (Cunliffe et al., 2013: 82). The general judgement of the article might sound disappointing to those who see SNS as a chance for the conquest of new domains for endangered heritage languages: �As a result, this research suggests that language use on these SNS largely reflects the language of real-world communities� (Cunliffe et al., 2013: 85).

Connected to the phenomenon of code-switching, which occurred in all four subgroups in the study on the use of Welsh on SNS (Cunliffe et al., 2013), I wish to draw attention to a topic I discussed above regarding Udmurt: language purism and prescriptivism, here regarding Welsh, is discussed and criticised as dangerous for the revitalisation efforts of Welsh and endangered languages in general by, e.g. David Crystal (2003, 2004, 2006, etc.) in several places. A study devoted to the daily language use of Welsh speakers (Beaufort, 2013: 47) seems to suggest that Facebook, for example, can be a place for the use of �Wenglish�, i.e. code-switching and code-mixing of English and Welsh, due to its informal character. But SNS such as �Twitter also enabled (mostly) passive exposure to the Welsh language, that is, following rather than tweeting, with a few participants following individuals who used Welsh in their tweets (e.g., Welsh international rugby players)�, which, among other means of passive language usage, reduces �[...] the fear of being judged on Welsh language capabilities� (Beaufort, 2013: 16). As was stated earlier, rugby is considered the national sport of Wales, and rugby players or other celebrities �[...] could play an important role in helping to raise the profile of Welsh language usage on a day to day basis� (Beaufort, 2013: 81).


Internet Access and the Use of SNS in Wales and Udmurtia

A short listing of key numbers will be presented in order to compare the representation of Udmurt and Welsh on the internet. Wales and Welsh are considered a role model not only due to sociolinguistic research, but also due to research conducted on the use of the internet within Wales. Research of this sort has been carried out by the Welsh government on a regular basis, and the results can be easily accessed via the internet (e.g. National Survey, 2014; for a focus on broadband internet cf. Wilkinson, 2013; for a UK perspective cf. e.g. Ofcom, 2012, 2013). The data for Wales are quite broad in scope and detailed, but since the data for Udmurtia are very poor (see next paragraph), only a couple of key figures that can be compared to data from Udmurtia are discussed in this section.

In the National Survey of Wales in 2013�2014, �75% of households in Wales reported accessing the internet at home. This equates to 82% of people aged 18 or over accessing the internet at home� (National Survey, 2014: 1). The internet is used �at home, work or elsewhere�. The most likely users of the internet were households with two adults and with children (96%); the least likely users of the internet were households consisting of single pensioners (34%). Mobile devices play an ever greater role since 78% of younger users (18�24) used the internet from a mobile phone or smartphone, whereas 71% of all users used a laptop (National Survey, 2014). The difference between rural and urban locations �surprisingly� seems to be �negligible� (Whitworth et al., 2014: 20), although coverage in �sparsely populated rural areas [is] most vulnerable to access gaps� (Whitworth et al., 2014: 8). This study and others show a lot more interesting information than mentioned here, but as the data from Udmurtia are quite poor, a more in-depth comparison is not viable.

When trying to find data for the Udmurt language, it turned out that comparable figures or research results were hard to find or did not exist, at least for a public audience. The only figures that could be found are those from the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat = Федеральная служба государственной статистики), which publishes a yearbook that can be downloaded from the internet. According to this yearbook, 73.6% of private households had personal computers, and 64.8% had access to the internet in Udmurtia in 2011. By 2012, these numbers had risen to 82.8% and 67.4%, respectively (Statistic Yearbook, 2013: 464). Udmurtia ranks first in the Volga (Privolzhsky) federal district (Приволжский федеральный округ, Privolzhsky federalny okrug) in this respect. The federal district�s averages for these figures in 2012 were 64.7% and 52.9% (Statistic Yearbook, 2013).

The numbers for Udmurtia are not only high in an intraregional comparison, but also in comparison with other administrative units and even big cities like Saint Petersburg (80.5% and 77.3%) or Moscow (80.8%


and 76.8%). The actual number of people with access to the internet could be even higher, as people use the internet not only at home, but also at work. A total of 94.4% of (not further specified) �organisations� in Udmurtia own personal computers, 16% operate �other types of data processing systems� (ЭВМ других типов) and 91.1% of these �organisations� had access to the internet (Statistic Yearbook, 2013: 464). Unfortunately, the information is not classified in more detail, e.g. into age groups, urban/rural population or other relevant strata.

Figures on the use of mobile phones in Udmurtia were not available to me1; the only numbers at my disposal are from unpublished sources of the administration of the president and the government of the Udmurt Republic. These show that there are 2.8 million SIM cards in use in the Udmurt Republic, which is more than Udmurtia has inhabitants (the population amounts to ca. 1.5 million). Nevertheless, the figure seems plausible, as many users in Udmurtia use more than one SIM card because they have several mobile devices. Another factor is the bad coverage in rural settlements and the existence not only of 11 time zones, but also of many tariff zones in Russia. Many users thus have SIM cards from different companies for different tariff zones.

The numbers seem to suggest that the difference between internet usage in Wales and Udmurtia as a whole is not as great as may be expected. However, if we look at the language use of Welsh and Udmurt on SNS, we can observe a strong disparity. In order to compare the linguistic usage of Welsh and Udmurt, I studied some numbers for three typical resources of Web 2.0: blogs, Twitter and Wikipedia. Since it is difficult to determine the exact numbers of Welsh blogs and tweets, I used an internet tool provided by the American computer scientist Kevin Scannell (2014). This tool shows blogs and tweets in heritage languages and uses a statistical algorithm to establish the percentage of language content in the heritage language (cf. Pischlöger, 2014b: 147), in contrast to, in most cases, the majority language. Concerning blogs, on 1 November 2014 there were 278 Welsh blogs with 24,635 posts and 5,918,097 words compared to 23 blogs, 935 posts and 162,191 words in Udmurt. Concerning Twitter, we see a similar disproportion, with 14,244 Welsh language users and 3,573,458 tweets, compared to only 15 users tweeting 8,739 tweets, at least partly, in the Udmurt language. This number must be further relativised since about two thirds of these tweets were made by only one person (cf. above).

Although the employed tool of automatic language processing is extremely useful, it must be added that the list of blogs and Twitter users is by no means complete. This is plainly visible in the case of the Udmurt language, as a couple of key players are not on the list. In other cases, it is doubtful whether some bloggers or Twitter users should be on the list at all, since they are seemingly no longer active. Another thing to mention is that the automatic update of this list takes a while, so the current numbers on


this page are always a little bit outdated (cf. Pischlöger, 2014b: 147). This seems, however, to be a minor problem.

The Welsh language Wikipedia had 60,537 articles, 16 administrators, 5,216,748 edits, 30,356 users, 86 active users (according to the metrics used by Wikipedia), 15,463 images and a �depth� of 63 according to the interior Wikipedia statistics on 2 November 2014 (List of Wikipedias, 2014). According to van Dijk (2009: 238), it belongs to the category of �Medium Wikipedias [�] with more than 10,000 real articles. [...], showing quite a lot of activity, [...]�. The question of what a �real� article is goes beyond the scope of this contribution, but is covered in depth by van Dijk (2009). Even if we subtract the �pseudo-articles� (cf. van Dijk, 2009: 237) from the �real� articles, the Welsh language edition of Wikipedia would remain in the category of �Medium Wikipedias�. The Udmurt language edition of Wikipedia, on the other hand, belongs to the category of �Small Wikipedias� which �[...] can cover the range of human knowledge only in fragments, and there is usually not very much activity� (van Dijk, 2009: 238). On 2 November 2014, the Udmurt Wikipedia had 3,520 articles, 103,895 edits, 3 administrators, 6,180 users, 18 active users, 166 images and a �depth� of 25. Even if the Wikipedia is growing slowly but steadily (cf. Pischlöger, 2014b: 149), this comparative lack of activity and the small number of administrators and active users raise the question of whether the Udmurt Wikipedia can be regarded as a typical Web 2.0 tool characterised by participation in contrast to the publishing of Web 1.0 (cf. O�Reilly, 2007: 18). It must be mentioned that these numbers do not reflect the quality of the Wikipedia articles. Some Udmurt articles feature content not available in other languages, which undoubtedly brings an added value (cf. Pischlöger, 2014b: 149).

Facebook has a feature that allows users to state their command of different languages. According to these self-assessments, no fewer than 630,000 people claimed to speak Welsh in early November 2014. This is remarkable since in the most recent UK census in 2011, only 562,000 people, and in 2001 576,000 people (UK Census, 2011: 13) claimed to speak Welsh. The picture is similar for Irish, another Celtic language: here 1,218,850 Facebook users claim to speak Irish (on 22 November 2014). Although 1.77 million people claimed to speak Irish in the Irish Census of 2011, only 77,185 claimed to �speak it daily outside the education system�, and only a further 110,642 said that they speak it weekly (Irish Census, 2011: 40). Based on the aforementioned data, it can be assumed that not all users claiming to speak Welsh or Irish on Facebook are really able to do so. Nevertheless, they use social media to demonstrate that Welsh or Irish plays an important role in their identity. The SNS VKontakte (ВКонтакте �in contact�) and Odnoklassniki (Ru. Одноклассники �classmates�), which have a function analogous to Facebook in Russian society, show the greatest representation of the Udmurt language and Udmurt-language-related groups and personal profiles (cf. Pischlöger, 2014b: 149�154). Although membership numbers


in Udmurt groups reach into the thousands (Pischlöger, 2014b), only 22,155 users claim to speak Udmurt on VKontakte (22 November 2014). The SNS Odnoklassniki, which is considered more popular among older users, unfortunately does not have a feature allowing users to state their language competence. The numbers we have, though, seem to point to the conclusion that knowledge of Welsh (and e.g. also Irish) has a much higher prestige than knowledge of Udmurt.

DiscussionThe aim of this chapter was to compare the use of the Udmurt language

on SNS with the use of another heritage language on SNS, namely Welsh, in order to find out to what extent a language like Udmurt can profit from the research results regarding Welsh. Welsh was chosen for several reasons: (1) it is considered to be a role model for language revitalisation and maintenance efforts; (2) its sociolinguistic situation is well researched; and (3) there are already several studies on the language use of Welsh on SNS, which have been conducted over a longer period of time. There are also other reasons a comparison between Udmurt and Welsh could be useful: both languages are more or less restricted to certain (rural) regions, domains, social strata and age groups; both languages have a diaspora; and both languages are opposed by seemingly omnipotent competing majority languages (Russian and English).

As a first approach, I tried to compare figures on internet availability and access in Wales and the Udmurt Republic. For Wales, there is sufficient and easily available data, whereas the data for Udmurtia are insufficient and hard to obtain. Nevertheless, the available data suggest that, while access to the internet in Wales is higher, the difference is not as great as one might have expected. For example, 82% of people aged over 18 in Wales had internet access at home in 2014, compared to 67.4% in Udmurtia. Internet access on mobile devices could not be included, since official data for Udmurtia are unavailable, although mobile devices quite likely would increase the number of people with access to the internet. However, a comparison between the language use of Welsh and Udmurt on selected SNS, namely blogs, Twitter and the Udmurt/Welsh Wikipedias, shows a different picture. The numbers here suggest that Udmurt language use is still very much �countable� as regards user and group numbers on diverse SNS, and that SNS are dominated by a few urban activists and journalists (cf. Pischlöger, 2014b). Meanwhile, Welsh seems to have been subjected to a �normalisation� (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 244), and now occupies its niche on the internet and SNS. Nevertheless, Facebook, for example, was also used as a tool of language activism at an early stage (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 236). A comparison of self-reported language knowledge of Welsh on Facebook compared with self-reported language knowledge on its Russian counterpart VKontakte showed that approximately 600,000


people claimed to speak Welsh, whereas only slightly over 20,000 people claimed to speak Udmurt. This obvious over-reporting for Welsh (and also, e.g. Irish) is a clear indication that Welsh has a much higher prestige and symbolic value for Walians (and maybe sympathisers of Welsh and Wales) than the Udmurt language has for Udmurt speakers.

A relatively large part of this chapter was dedicated to the phenomenon of language purism or prescriptivism, as observed among speakers of both languages, and other endangered and non-endangered languages. The research results for Welsh suggest that the informal language use on SNS allows people to use any kind of language variety, including code-switching and code-mixing (�Wenglish�), without the fear of being judged by others because of their language knowledge, whether for (re)learners or native speakers. Russia, with its official language of Russian, is a �standard language culture� (Milroy, 2001), and this way of thinking is often transferred by philologists and speakers of minority languages in Russia to their own languages. The focus of Udmurt philologists is on the Udmurt standard language, a variety which is mastered by less than 10% of the Udmurt speakers (Yedygarova, 2013: 16). The spoken Udmurt language, including the counterpart of �Wenglish�, namely �suro-puzho� (суро-пожо �blending, mixture, potpourri; mixed�), is hardly researched and is frowned upon. It can be found, e.g. on Udmurt blogs or postings on other SNS, which are practically �free� of philologists. At the very least, users do not seem to be afraid of being ridiculed.

In an interview in which I took part, I asked a young female journalist, who is also maintaining a blog, whether it makes a difference if she writes an article in an official newspaper or a posting on her blog. Her answer was that there is, of course, a difference, since one does not have to adhere to the rules of the literary language when writing a blog post. She can use �mixed� and more colloquial language, which makes her style more emotional. This language register is, as a consequence, easier to read in her opinion. Another young blogger wrote in one blog post �Russified. So what?� in the typical mix of Udmurt and Russian (slang): ��Weeell, � they say � in my writings there are too many Russian words, there is no syntax at all, the lexis is nothing�. (linguists say that. Who else :)). Russified. But I write in the same way how I speak. Writing in this way is easier for myself, and it is also not difficult to read (many say that it is easy to read)� (�Вооот,- шуо,- ӟуч кылъёс трос гожъямъёсам, нокыӵе синтаксисэз ӧвӧл, лексика никакущий. (ма филолоос верало ни. Кинъёс на :)). Ӟучомем. Но мон ведь гожъясько озьы, кызьы вераськисько. Тазьы гожъяса мыным аслым каньылгес, лыдӟыны но секыт ӧвӧл (тросэз шуо, что каньыл лыдӟыны)� (Udmurto4ka, 2014: blog post from 23 September 2013, cf. Figure 4.4). Udmurto4ka�s (2014) and Marajko�s (2014) blogs were the subject of a presentation at the 7th Budapest Uralic Workshop in Budapest, and were analysed as regards language attitudes and some grammatical features by Laura Horváth (2014).


These examples together with the Welsh research results indicate that the acceptance of �incorrect�, �mixed�, colloquial and informal language use on SNS allows endangered heritage languages like Udmurt to give a �response to new domains and media� (cf. Language Vitality, 2003), one of nine factors in evaluating the vitality of a language (Language Vitality, 2003). SNS can be and are used even by those speakers who do not have a formal education in their primarily oral language. Unfortunately, there are no established benchmarks for the use of a minority language on SNS. Concerning the use of Welsh on Facebook, for example: �[...] it is not clear what the benchmark for comparison should be; English-language groups that are Welsh, other minority language groups, general English-language groups?� (Honeycutt & Cunliffe, 2010: 234).

Language purism is a widespread phenomenon among Udmurt language activists who promote(d) various campaigns, e.g. for the creation of neologisms (Malpa vyl� kyl, 2014) or of an Udmurt interface for VKontakte through a multi-year group effort � but which now is hardly in use (cf. above and Pischlöger, 2014b: 149�150). The results of the Welsh studies could also be instructive for language activists wishing to channel their efforts more economically and wishing to avoid wasting time, energy and resources unnecessarily on projects of minor importance. The use of this

Figure 4.4 ‘Russifi ed. So what? […] “Weeell, – they say – in my writings there are too many Russian words, there is no syntax at all, the lexis is nothing”. (linguists say that. Who else :)). Russifi ed. But I write in the same way how I speak. Writing in this way is easier for myself, and it is also not diffi cult to read (many say that it is easy to read)’


code-switching and code-mixing, the so-called суро-пожо, also led to the emergence of the �internet poetry� of Bogdan Anfinogenov, a young Udmurt PhD student at the Udmurt Institute for History, Language and Literature who runs several literary and musical projects on SNS (cf. Pischlöger, 2014a). Perhaps musicians and poets like Bogdan Anfinogenov, Svetlana Ruchkina or Nikolay Anisimov (cf. Pischlöger, 2013b: 173; 2014b: 156), who became celebrities in large part thanks to SNS, can serve as role models for the promotion of the Udmurt language via SNS. In the Welsh case, this is done by rugby players and referees (Beaufort Research, 2013: 16, 52), by a rapper for Inari Sámi and by a stand-up comedian for Irish (Moriarty & Pietikäinen, 2011).

The Welsh language has a prominent place in The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice (Hinton & Hale, 2001), since �[o]f all the Gaelic speaking peoples, it is the Welsh who have had the most success in keeping their language alive� (Hinton, 2001: 104). The Green Book understands itself to be an answer to UNESCO�s Red Book. The successor of the Red Book, the UNESCO Atlas of the World�s Languages in Danger, classifies Udmurt as �definitely endangered�. Maybe SNS can play a vital role in putting Udmurt (and other endangered languages) into the Green Book as well, by improving its image and showing that an urban, modern lifestyle and the Udmurt language do not contradict each other. In any case, the representation and visibility of the Udmurt language on SNS can be regarded as a paragon for other Uralic languages of the Russian Federation.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank, in alphabetical order, Nikolay Anisimov, Hèctor Alòs i Font, Bogdan Anfinogenov, Aleksandr Bikuzin, Yevgeniy Bikuzin, Jean-Baptiste Blanc, Jeremy Bradley, Marie Dugast Casen, Sébastien Cagnoli, Lara Dmitriyeva, Laura Horváth, Johanna Laakso, Artyom Malykh, Nadyezhda Mamontova, Nadi Mush, Pavel Pozdeyev, Yelena Ryabina, Janne Saarikivi, Denis Sakharnykh, Lukerya Shikhova, Kevin Scannell, Aleksey Shklyayev, Reetta Toivanen, Olga Urasinova, Mariya Vekshina, Svetlana Yedygarova and Aleksandr Zamyatin for their help and patience. I take full responsibility for any mistakes left in the final manuscript.

Note(1) It could be that some of these numbers can be found in the omnibus volume

Science and Innovation in the Udmurt Republic («Наука и инновации в Удмуртской Республике»), published by the Udmurt branch of the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Science and Innovation, 2014). According to a catalogue published in 2014, this volume contains among other things also data from


2009 to 2013 on the use of information and communication technology. Unfortunately, this monograph has not (yet) been available to me, as it is not to be found in any easily accessible libraries in Izhevsk. This may be indicative of the lower transparency, and availability of data, in Udmurtia in comparison to Wales.

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