What is the relatrionship between language, identity social policy and community level language revival moments among the indigenious groups?

This project will explore the relationship between language, identity, social policy and language revival community projects amongst indigenous ethnic groups in far eastern Russia and northern Japan. It will analyse the attempts of regional indigenous rights groups, online campaigners, and educational institutions to revive the indigenous languages of the ethnic groups native to Sakhalin and Hokkaido through language classes, traditional ceremonies, and indigenous rights movements active online, in response to recent changes in government social policy.

This research will also analyse the relationship between indigenous language acquisition and identity amongst majority language-speaking members of the minority indigenous groups. This project will focus on community-level language revitalisation programmes, examining both real world initiatives and online movements, and a geographic focus will be placed on the long-disputed islands of Hokkaido (Japan) and Sakhalin (Russia), home to multiple minority indigenous ethnic groups, including the Ainu, the Ulta and the Nivkh, whise respective languages are all currently designated as 'critically endangered' or 'severely endangered' by UNESCO. Focus will also be specifically placed on events taking place in or after 2007, the year in which the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.

The majority of studies regarding the Ainu, Uilta and Nivkh ethnic groups are conducted within the frameworks of modern borders, ignoring their intertwined histories and limiting the scope of research to either Russian studies or Japanese studies. I argue that by looking past modern borders we can gain a deeper understanding of the situation in which these indigenous groups find themselves today, while simultaneously using the close histories of the languages in question as a benchmark to compare the effects of two very different social policies. This can also be used to establish the ways in which community level groups promoting the revival of indigenous languages influence, and are influenced by, the identities of their learners. With this in mind, this research will answer the following questions: What is the role of community level indigenous language revival movements in Sakhalin and Hokkaido today? What is the relationship between the actions of these groups and the social policies of the governments of Russia and Japan? How do the identities of indigenous language learners change as the process of indigenous language acquisition develops?

Furthermore, this project will explore the actions of language revival movements online, examining the web as the contact zone in which "cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other" (Pratt: 1991), and the (re) construction of indigenous identities at a community level.

The approach will be based on sociolinguistic and linguistic-anthropological methods, building on Holmes and Meyerhoff's (1999) social-constructionist approach for engaging with 'communities of practice'. Spending time in both Hokkaido and Sakhalin and working with institutions there, will allow me to establish valuable contacts both in indigenous and academic communities. For this reason, I will spend six months in Hokkaido and six months in Sakhalin, and carry out fieldwork consisting of 20 semi-structured interviews with members of indigenous communities and members of indigenous language revival movements in each place. The project will also use pre-existing quantitative data on indigenous populations and language comprehension, along with discourse analysis of both outside media representations of indigenous peoples and their languages, and indigenous auto-ethnographic works, in order to develop a contextual framework regarding modern indigenous identities. In addition to this the research will examine social policy and legislature at both a regional and national level.