[Column] Thoughts about the Kalmyk language

Professor Gwon Jae-il, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University

Kalmykia is a Russian federal republic to the west of the Caspian Sea. Its president was once the Russia-based salesman for a Korean automobile maker and earned a lot of money in the process. After becoming president, he signed an agreement on economic cooperation between his city and the city of Seoul, and even tried to build a free economic zone called "Seoul Town."

In the early 17th century, the area had about 300,000 Oriats who came from western Mongolia. They came to be the Kalmyks, and in Turk, "Kalmyk" means "those who remain." In other words, these are the people who came to the region and never returned to where they came from. They speak Kalmyk, a language related to Mongolian.

Today, the Kalmyk language faces two problems. One is that the Kalmyk population is shrinking and most use Russian in everyday life. Kalmyks feel the need to keep their national language alive, but the reality they face is not so easy. The other problem is that the grammar is gradually changing. Kalmyk sentence structure is traditionally like Korean, with a "subject-object-verb" structure, but Russian interference has led people to frequently place the verb right after the subject.

President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov recently made a novel request to the Chinese government: that China send to Kalmykia its 10,000 Chinese Oriats. Part of the proposal was that if they come they will be accommodated to the fullest. The idea is a reflection of the strong determination of a young leader to revive the dying Kalmyk language by bringing in people of the same ethnic group.