ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the metaphor of a language life cycle can be politically and socially problematic. A large volume of global literature has been dedicated to language revitalization movements, accepting the old metaphor of language life cycle which persisted in academic rhetoric. The concept of language shift as a result of competition among separate languages began to be used in both academic and political discourse. The view of language as a doomed species can be problematic within the political discourse of the Vepsian revival. The authors decided to visit the Vepsian ethnographic museum in Kurb. The museum, once part of the village school, was shut down in 2009, and Svetlana Ershova, former Maths and Vepsian teacher, had reopened it in a separate building. Despite a common svoy-chuzhoy paradigm among Veps and Russians, lexical, and morpho-syntactic movement indicates that it is attached to different language ideologies and ontology.
