ABSTRACT
Based on ethnographic research in the multilingual and ethnically diverse community of practice of Mehnat – an ‘urban-type settlement’ in northern Tajikistan – this chapter contributes to the debates on language in the region by analysing the complexity of language ideologies and language strategies ‘on the ground’. The chapter is inspired by a language ecology approach and approaches language as a resource. Instead of placing language at the centre of debates about nationalism and ethnicity in the region, it explores the lived realities of language in the context of statecraft, mass migration to Russia and people’s projects of self-cultivation. It shows that while the state is promoting a certain hierarchy of languages placing the emergent variety of literary Tajik at the top, people’s attitudes to different idioms and their language choices are tied to past and future imaginaries rooted in specific experiences of place, gender, class and families’ strategies in seeking social mobility. Thus, Uzbek is relegated to the status of a ‘useless’ language as it stands for the lack of opportunities for viable futures outside rural livelihoods, while both Tajik and Russian bear a promise of mobility, each in a different way.
