Language in ethnological expertise: a case study of a northern city

This paper introduces a sociolinguistic methodology for evaluating the social impact on language and culture. The framework proposed makes it possible to analyze the interplay between key socio-cultural factors that are key in shaping the image of the city. These include the urban community's relationship with the natural environment, alongside historical, political, and economic influences, demographic composition, communicative and symbolic power dynamics, linguistic competition and monopoly, language ideologies, and linguistic activism in the North. While offering opportunities for intercultural exchange and the expansion of linguistic repertoires among Arctic populations, urban environments also introduce the risk of linguistic assimilation and the weakening of native languages. Linguistic comfort is directly related to socio-economic development, which consequently leads to cultural diversity and may foster either the creation of hybrid cultural forms or the integration of a local community under a single predominant language, potentially harming less widely spoken languages due to demographic expansion, labor mobility, and industrial growth. Universal linguistic indicators for quality-of-life assessment may be incorporated into a classification of indigenous communities based on their life support systems, cultural resilience, and ethnological impact evaluations. In addition, these metrics can be integrated into the international system for assessing the welfare of the Arctic population, including in urban settings. The study draws on data from a comprehensive survey of the linguistic space (2023-2024) in Anadyr, Yakutsk, Bilibino, and Mirny, with questionnaires completed by 800 respondents and interviews performed with 41 individuals from diverse social groups.

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