Germany had an even wider spread before WW II. German was spoken in Germany, Austria, Romania, Italy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Poland, the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the USSR. It is still found in the first seven; and there are remnants of the old “Volga German” population in Russia today. The eastern spread of German was due to colonizing in the Middle Ages, and later to settlements of German craftsmen sponsored by local rulers.

But the point is that one should be proud of the cultural and linguistic heritage of a country and cherish it, and not try to draw borders where there aren’t any.

The territory around the Russian city of Vyborg, for instance, hasn’t been mostly Fennophone since the drawing of the 1945 border that assigned most of Finnish Karelia to the then-Soviet Union. Elsewhere, Flemish, Alsatian and Catalan in France are in full retreat, Irish is given a much larger territory as a majority language than is the actual case, and both Russia’s Ivangorod and Estonia’s Ida-Viru county are shown as mostly Estophone, not Russophone.

France has plenty as well: French, Dutch, German (several different dialects from Alsatian to Franconian), Provencal, Catalan, Basque, Breton, Walloon, etc.

The linguistic diversity of Russia is an after-effect of its imperial history and its conquest of the Caucasus, where Dagestan, for example, has something like six official languages of its own.

Tatar linguistic and cultural pride is on the increase, but Russia requires them to write in the Cyrillic alphabet, which is deeply resented.

1. I’ve got four books on Komi language. They were published in 1949, 1955, 1992 and in 2005.

2. While living in the USSR, I never heard so many people speaking Tatar in the streets. No idea why it was not popular in the Soviet times. I think that the Tatars were ashamed of their own language. Now, there are Tatar newspapers and TV broadcasting in the Tatar language. And you know what? People began speaking Tatar openly.

PS: I wanted to make some pictures when I visited this year’s Sabantuy. Unfortunately, the batteries in the camera drained when they were most needed, as usual…

Paul Goble wrote a good article about one such case:
http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/02/window-on-eurasia-russian-capitalists.html

Perhaps its because the map’s compilers thought that if they showed every single language in Russia the map would became so complex and colourful that it would just make people’s eyeballs explode..