ABSTRACT
Selkup is used in family life and in traditional domains of the economy such as fishing and hunting, but not in administration or other official spheres. Several attempts to introduce it as the language of education in elementary schools and to develop Selkup literacy, made especially between the 1930s and 1950s, have never been supported by any systematic efforts. Having recently been reintroduced in several schools, Selkup found itself in the position of a second and foreign language as a result of low native-language proficiency among schoolchildren. The activity of the national cultural society Qatt;;, Qup ('Man of the [Ob'] River') since the late 1980s has been a help in preserving Selkup national identity (see Pusztay: 1992), but the chances for the retention of Selkup by coming generations are close to zero for Southern Selkups (in the Tomsk region) and not very high in the North (the Tyumen and Krasnoyarsk regions).
