Religiosity in Russia

May 6, 2016 by

Religiosity in Russia

[Thanks to Boris Denisov and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions of these issues.] A recent question from a student about just how religious Russians really are has sent me to look for statistics on this issue. As sociologists of...

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Languages and genes don’t always match

Feb 4, 2011 by

When it comes to classifying ethnic, racial and linguistic groups, many people still believe that if the languages of two groups are related, the peoples must be related as well. But relying on linguistic connections to establish...

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Finnic traits in Russian

Feb 2, 2011 by

As mentioned in the previous posting, the current consensus among Slavic linguists is that Finnic languages once spoken in what is now central Russia have left their mark on the Russian language. In the domain of vocabulary such...

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On the Mari language and Mari schools

Jan 11, 2011 by

Russian Federation is a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic country with over 100 languages being listed for it in the Ethnologue.com. Yet many of these languages are endangered, with more and more speakers switching to Russian. In part,...

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Saami

May 25, 2010 by

In yesterday’s posting I started discussing the languages of Sweden. Today, we’ll look at another (group of) language(s) spoken in Sweden — Saami languages. They are members of the Finno-Ugric language family and as...

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