The Soyot language

I. Sociolinguistic data

Existing alternative names

It is sometimes called the Soyot-Tsaatan language (since Soyot is close to the language of the Tsaatan spoke in Mongolia), but the term “Soyot” is used far more frequently. The Soyot’s endonym is soyyt , the same ethnonym һо yod (logically in a different phonetic form) was used by Buryats to refer to the Soyot as the latter live among Buryats and have switched to their language. The Tofalar (the Soyot’s neighbors speaking a very similar language) call the Soyot һаа zuut after the name of the largest Soyot clan.

General characteristics

Number of native speakers and the corresponding ethnic group

Currently, there are no native speakers fluent in Soyot. The 2020 Census put the total number of the Soyot in Russia at 4,368 persons (however, these data should probably be treated with some caution, see the section on historical dynamics). Still, 19 people indicated knowing Soyot (but it may be knowledge of merely a few words or simple phrases): what is more telling is that out of 4,368 persons, only 37 listed Soyot as their native tongue, although censuses generally provide overstated data of native speakers: people tend to list as their native language not the tongue they learned from their parents (which would be most precise in the scholarly perspective), but the language that has relatively recently (maybe in the preceding generation) been used in the community and is therefore perceived as the traditional tongue of this particular ethnic group.

Age of speakers.

Currently, there are no Soyot speakers to have learned the language naturally, in their family. Valentin I. Rassadin noted that he had met the last speakers of Soyot in the early 1990s and back then, the Soyot still “preserved many elements of their everyday and spiritual culture, and not only the legends, fairy tales, and songs, but shamanic invocations, although all of that in Buryat ” [italics mine]. Yet in the 1970s, the language was still functional: Valentin I. Rassadin collected a Soyot dictionary (that contained both basic everyday vocabulary and a rich vocabulary of the traditional culture) and recorded Soyot texts (he published at least one fairy tale). There are attempts to revive Soyot, in particular, the practice of teaching Soyot in school.

Sociolinguistic characteristics.

Level of the threat of extinction

Soyot should be considered a dormant language since the late 20 ^th century.

Use in different fields.

Soyot is taught at the Sorok Soyot Boarding School for Complete General Education state budget-funded educational institution; as if 2020, Soyot was taught to 57 students. Clearly, with the 2020 Census putting the total number of the Soyot at 4368 persons, the number of school-age children is significantly more than 57. In addition to the Sorok school, the Oka district of the Republic of Buryatia has three complete education schools and two “elementary school – kindergarten” type educational institutions that, like kindergartens, do not teach Soyots.

Information on the writing system (if applicable).

Throughout its natural existence, Soyot remained unwritten. The alphabet for it was developed at the time when attempts to revitalize the dormant language were being made. In 1995, Valentin I. Rassadin developed “The Soyot Language Revival” program. In 2001, he designed a Cyrillic-based alphabet for Soyot. The alphabet and the orthographic rules align with the principles used in developing alphabets for other Turkic languages of the region. In addition to Cyrillic letters used in the Russian alphabet, special letters қ , ғ , ҷ , һ , ң , ө , ү , ә , i were added to render specific sounds of the Soyot language. Long sounds are rendered with double letters, pharyngalization is rendered by combining the letter signifying the vowel in question with the hard sign (for instance, a ъ )

The Soyot alphabet:

Geographic characteristics:

Constituent entities of the Russian Federation with ethnic communities .

The Oka district (Buryat: Akhyn aymag ) in the Republic of Buryatia

Total number of traditional native settlements.

The Oka district of Buryatia, the site of Soyot ethnic communities, has a total of 15 settlements arranged into four village settlements.

The list of settlements

The Oka district has settlements: the ulus of Alag-Shulun, the ulus of Balakta, the village of Bokson, the village of Botogol, the ulus of Zun-Kholba, the village of Orlik, the village of Samarta, the village of Sayany, the ulus of Sorok, the ulus of Subarya, the ulus of Khara-Khuzhir, the village of Khuzhir, the ulus of Khurga, the ulus of Sharza, the ulus of Shasnur.

Historical dynamics:

This section should be opened with a discussion of a fairly popular claim that in the 18 ^th century, the Soyot spoke a Samoyedic language. This claim is based primarily on a remark by Peter Simon Pallas in his Journey Through Various Provinces of the Russian State (1788) that the Mator and the Koibal, two peoples speaking Samoyedic languages, claim that the Soyot “who roam the mountains beyond the Russian border” speak a language that is very similar to Mator.  Pallas apparently set down precisely what he had been told yet, as Evgeny A. Helimski showed in his Ancient Hungarian and Samoyedic Linguistic Paradigm (1982), interpretation of this information likely involved a misunderstanding stemming from different uses of the word “Soyot”: “There is no linguistic evidence (lists of words, toponyms, glosses, etc.) that before speaking a Turkic language, the Soyot spoke a Samoyedic language. It is highly likely that the information relayed by Pallas who did not speak with any Soyot in person is a result of by inaccurate information conveyed by the local population. In 1727, when Russia and China demarcated their border, most of the Mator ended up as Chinese subjects. Since, however, the area Pallas talks about (today’s northeastern Tuva) was largely populated by the Soyot and, as Matthias Alexander Castrén had noted, Tatars of Minusinsk (i.e. the Khakas) used the word ‘Soyot’ to refer to all tribes living beyond the Sayan Mountain range, information on Mator being spoken abroad could be mistakenly interpreted as evidence of the Soyot speaking a Samoyedic language.” In any case, there is no objective evidence of the Soyot switching from a Samoyedic language to a Turkic one as recently as the 18 ^th century: we have no records of a “Samoyedic Soyot” language, no significant traces of such a language in the structure or lexis of today’s “Turkic Soyot.” Naturally, the entire history of the Sayan region implies that individual groups within the local Turkic peoples were formed pursuant to local Samoyeds switching to Turkic languages (such was the history of Kamasins who switched to the Khakas language in the 20 ^th century). But there are no grounds to claim that back in the 18 ^th century, the Soyot were a people who spoke a separate Samoyedic language that they later replaced with a Turkic one.

While considering the historical dynamics of language command for most small-numbered peoples of the Russian Federation we primarily discuss their gradual switching to Russian, the Soyot’s native tongue functioned primarily in interaction with Buryats. The Soyot are presumed to have relatively recently, in the 18 ^th century, moved with their reindeer from the area of Lake Hovsgol in Mongolia and settled in Oka, at the watershed ridge of the rivers Oka and Irkut, in the area of Lake Ilchir where natural conditions (in particular, an abundance of reindeer lichen) were favorable for reindeer herding. But already in the early 18 ^th century, Buryats began settling on the central mesa of the Eastern Sayan Mountains. The Soyot and Buryats co-existed peacefully as each people occupied their own environmental niche in accordance with their traditional activities: Buryats engaged in animal husbandry in the steppes of the Sayan mesa, while the Soyot were engaged in reindeer herding in the region’s mountainous taiga area. Nonetheless, several reasons resulted in Soyot being fairly rapidly lost: first, multiple inter-ethnic marriages where children learned their mothers’ native Buryat tongue. Second, many Soyot switched to Buryat-style animal husbandry and consequently merged culturally and linguistically with the numerically dominant Buryat people. Thus, by the early 20 ^th century, it was primarily culturally isolated groups of reindeer-herding Soyot that had preserved their language. Although already in 1926, Professor of the Irkutsk State University Berngard E. Petri who conducted a field study of the Soyot’s occupations, everyday life, and culture upon instructions from the Committee for Assisting the Peoples of the North noted that only the elders remembered Soyot (which apparently was not quite true since in the 1970s, Valentin I. Rassadin could record the Soyot language), but that means at least that Soyot was no longer actively used as the main language of communication in the Soyot community. However, the Soyot were finding it progressively more difficult to engage in reindeer herding: in 1930, a large chunk of the reindeer was lost in an epizootic outbreak; before the Soyot could rebuild their herds by purchasing reindeer from Tuva Todzhins in Tuva or from the Tsaatan in Mongolia, in the 1930s and in the 1940s this course of action was prohibited as both Mongolia and Tuva were foreign states at the time, and bringing reindeer from those states was treated as smuggling. Additionally, that was also the time when the Soyot, like other small-numbered peoples, were switched to the settled way of life in villages where they were forced to engage in animal husbandry after the Buryat fashion, which naturally bolstered integration trends. In 1963, a decision of the Government of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic proclaimed Soyot reindeer-herding to be unprofitable economically and ultimately eliminated it delivering the final blow to the traditional Soyot way of life which, while it was being preserved, was slowing down the transition to the Buryat language. In the 1970s, all the Soyot who still remembered their native tongue spoke not only Russian, but also Buryat, but most Soyot spoke only Russian and Buryat.

The efforts to revitalize Soyot are combined with reviving the Soyot’s traditional hunting and reindeer-herding way of life and their traditional spiritual culture, i.e. these efforts seek to overcome the effect of natural assimilatory trends both in the realms of material and spiritual culture and in the realm of the community’s traditional language.

The First General Census held in the Russian Empire in 1897 recorded only 44 Soyot (which probably means that part of them were recorded as Buryats even back then), while the 1926 Census recorded 229 persons as Soyot (Berngard E. Petri during his ethnographic field study conducted that year counted 509 persons), and only 12 of them claimed to know Soyot! In later censuses, the Soyot were recorded as Buryats and not as a separate people; the Soyot were put on the Single List of Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of the Russian Federation only on March 24, 2000 (although the Republic of Buryatia had been trying to handle this problem since 1993). Accordingly, the Soyot make a comeback to All-Russian Censuses in 2000 (in the 1959, 1970, 1979, and 1989 censuses they were recorded as Buryats); a micro-census held in Buryatia’s Oka district in 1995 identified 1,973 Soyot. The 2002 Census recorded 2,769 Soyot, most of them speaking Buryat, while the 2010 Census recorded 3,608 Soyot, and the 2020 Census recorded 4,368 Soyot, and 37 of them listed Soyot as their native tongue, while 19 reported command of language. 21 ^st -century data on the number of the Soyot should be treated with some caution: since being a member of an indigenous small-numbered people offered certain economic benefits (not particularly significant ones), some Buryats may have recorded themselves as Soyot.

II. Linguistic data

Position in the genealogy of world languages

Together with related languages (Tofa, Tuvan, Tuvan-Todzhin, Tsaatan spoken in Mongolia), Soyot is a Sayan Turkic language. Peoples speaking the four languages listed (the Soyot, the Tofalar, Todzhins, and the Tsaatan) are reindeer herders, that is, this group constitutes a tight-knit unity both linguistically and culturally. Soyot was strongly influenced by Mongolic languages: at first Darkhad Mongolian, then Buryat (ultimately, as has been mentioned before, the Soyot switched to that language).

Dialects

No dialects are distinguished within Soyot; at least, by the 1970s, when research into Soyot began, no more consistent distinctions existed between dialect variants. Valentin I. Rassadin noted, however, that some words preserve phonetic distinctions depending on specific Soyot clans, for instance, bahi (spoken in the Haasut clan) ~ bashi (spoken in the Irkit clan), “his head.”