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Forest Enets

Speakers of Forest Enets live mainly in Potapovo and Dudinka of the Taimyr Municipal District, Krasnoyarsk Krai. Some of them spend a lot of time in the tundra in the vicinity of Potapovo.

Even the native speakers proficient in Enets very rarely use it in their daily communications. As long as their parents’ generation was alive (i.e. until the beginning of the 21 st century), they used Forest Enets to communicate with them, but once it was gone, Forest Enets now tend to speak Russian at home. The transmission of Forest Enets to the following generations has been interrupted, neither young adults, nor children are able to speak it.

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Tundra Enets

The Tundra Enets language is close to extinction. As mentioned above, its transmission to the younger generation has stopped, thus doing away with the only factor ensuring the viability of a language. It is very difficult to maintain a language that one did not learn in childhood. Native languages all over the world are faced with a similar situation: the pressure of the foreign language environment, the influence of the administratively dominant language (used in education, shops, hospitals, state institutions) leads to the fact that even the people who are quite fluent in their native tongue switch to the socially more prestigious language, they start speaking it at home and addressing the children in it. Special measures are needed to support small-numbered languages. Moreover, the initiative must come from both sides: from the state and from the linguistic community.

About language