On October 22-23, the National library of the Chuvash Republic hosted a discussion on new technologies in promoting and preserving the languages of the native peoples of Russia as a part of the scientific and practical conference «The Role of the state and civil society institutions in preserving the Chuvash language».
The conference is held within the framework of the project «My native language» and is implemented with the financial support of the federal agency of ethnic affairs within the framework of the State Program of the Russian Federation «Implementation of state ethnic policy».
The discussion was attended by state and public figures, editors, journalists, librarians from different regions of the Russian Federation.
In all these regions, important and necessary work is being carried out to preserve the languages of native peoples. For example, the Nogliki Central Library (Sakhalin region) publishes books for children in the Nivkh language, along with texts in Russian and English. Thanks to the support of sponsors, cartoons in two languages are being created, in order to preserve the sound of the language, audiobooks in the Uilta language have been published, 8 books have already been voiced.
Chuvash content is actively developed: the Chuvash language has appeared in the list of languages in the Internet service «Yandex.Translator», the initiator of the creation of a machine translator was Nikolai Plotnikov, editor-in-chief of the Chuvash people’s website.
Galina Bykova, Deputy Director, spoke about the online resources of the National Library in support of the Chuvash language. The library provides the broadest opportunities for learning the Chuvash language, providing an opportunity to read, listen and hear native speech, because it is the largest repository of the national library fund in the republic, numbering over 54 thousand titles, of which about 14 thousand are in the Chuvash language.
There are achievements, there are also problems: each speaker identified them for himself. All were unanimous in the opinion that only thanks to the common efforts of the family, school, community, state it is possible and necessary to preserve the native language.
The full version of the conference events can be found on the library’s Youtube channel.