Abstract:

This article presents some aspects of the family language policy of Estonian Tatars, the parents’ strategies for maintaining the Tatar language and the variety and value of these micro-level language support efforts. In the interviewed families both parents and children see the maintenance of Tatar as beneficial and the children appreciate that they are raised multilingually. Some scholars claim that Russification of the so-called “third ethnicities” in Estonia still continues, but the results of the current research reveals that this is not the case. Still, Russian is present in many domains due to the fact that the Tatar parents often were schooled in this language and have a poor command of Estonian; now Estonian is preferred as an instruction language for the children. During the Soviet period between the 1940s and the end of the 1980s, the Tatar language carried also a religious meaning and Russian was referred to as the language of the non-believers. Today the main motive for young people to speak Tatar is to maintain the communication with their family and relatives.

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