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Language Endangerment: Disappearing metaphors and shifting conceptualizations
Edited by Elisabeth Piirainen and Ari Sherris
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 7] 2015
► pp. 175–200

9. A nation without a language is a nation without heart

On vanishing Tatar idioms

The Tatar language has been exposed to significant transformations under the pressure of the Russian language. The nature of this pressure has been characterized as political, social, and cultural by different disciplinary traditions, with no small part being played by globalization. The purpose of this chapter is to explore endangered Tatar idioms along two revealing lines of enquiry. The first line of enquiry analyzes culture-specific Tatar idioms; the second line interrogates borrowed idioms from Russian sources. The paper argues that Russian idiom-adoption leads to loss of Tatar-specific knowledge as well as loss of Tatar-specific encodings of that knowledge otherwise found in traditional idioms. This indelibly transforms Tatar history and culture.
Keywords: culture, endangered metaphors, Tatar, unique idioms
Published online: 14 October 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.7.08giz
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