And so it began... | Nadya Bogdanova

Busy student cafeteria in Nador 15? Check. Laptop? Check. OneNote app? Check. Big book? Check.  Ticking all of those boxes can mean just one thing: I've started working on my thesis. 

On October 11 I had my first thesis meeting at the department. Professor Laszlovszky introduced me to Cristian Gaspar, and we had a productive discussion of my project. Both Joska and Cristian reassured me that the area of my interest is worth investigating but they also pointed out that I need to concentrate on finding my precise focus and formulate my research question in a way that it will be possible to come up with satisfactory answers to it (we had talked about it in the second session of Presenting Cultural Heritage class so I was already thinking about that by this time!). 

I decided to be honest with myself and agreed that my initial goal of "rebranding the Buryat language in order to promote its learning and usage" might sound great and world-changing enough but I had  to be real. Let's be honest: as smart and hard-working (and humble) as I am, I can't rebrand the language by myself. What I can do is to research one area that will allow to see why the Buryat language is in danger, what is done to help the situation and what the perspectives are. 

In my case, I think, it will be the attitude towards the Buryat language. Since the Soviet times, there's been the hard stigma of speaking this language: it was (and still is) associated with being un-educated, non-refined, even "uncivilized" while speaking Russian without accent has always been praised and made you eligible to belong to higher levels of society. For people of my generation this attitude has deepened by associating the Buryat language with something old-fashioned and dull. TV slots in Buryat, pop music in Buryat, newspapers - they all seem to be frozen in time and belong to the 1960s. 

However, the situation has started to change. Sporadically, but it is happening. There are young and "cool" people who learn the language, try to use it in everyday life, open social media accounts aimed at promoting the language by creating memes and funny videos. They even rap in the Buryat! 

So my research will lie somewhere there. Between media and rap! 

It is still quite vague but Cristian - as my potential supervisor - told me that eventually I will come up with the precise research question. 

In the meantime (when not listening to rap), I'm planning to work on several things to determine my further journey: 

• Define terms that will be crucial for my research. Some of them are: intangible cultural heritage, endangered language, language policy, language management, language attitude, linguistic identity;
• Read the recommended literature on endangered languages and language policy; 
• Read papers and books on language attitude and language perception and try to draw analogies;
• Study deeply federal and local policy documents concerning national and minority languages in Russia;
• Look for a particular direction in which I can illustrate the language attitude and ways of controlling / changing it (social media discourse, popular culture, art, TV etc.).

It is going to be fun.

To be continued.