Karelia’s "Yabloko" candidates to run on demand for indigenous language rights

Single-mandate candidates from Yabloko (whose federal party list was disqualified from the elections) will run for the Karelian Legislative Assembly with a platform advocating for the granting official status to the Karelian language, according to the party’s regional programme.

The Karelian language has experienced the sharpest decline in speakers among Russia’s national languages, according to a new journalistic investigation. By 2021, the number of Karelian speakers had plummeted to 13,800—a 73.7 percent drop compared to 2002. The median age of a Karelian speaker is 64, the highest among all republics’ languages. Only 0.5 percent of children under 9 speak Karelian.

"Karelian is not a mandatory subject in schools. People can study it only to preserve their identity as  Karelians. But in everyday life, the language is effectively being pushed out," says Valery Potashov, a journalist from Karelia. He notes that the question of granting Karelian official status was first raised in the local Legislative Assembly in the early 1990s and has been repeatedly debated since. Yet, each time, the initiative has been rejected by the Russian-speaking majority of deputies.

"Some saw it as a threat that would make Karelian mandatory in schools," Potashov explains. "This mindset dates back to Soviet times when all nations were lumped together as the ‘Soviet people.’ By 1991, Karelia had effectively lost its status as a national republic—Karelians became a minority, and, based on the latest census, they may soon qualify as an indigenous minority, as their population has fallen below 50,000."

Demands to grant the national language official status were also raised at the 10th Congress of Karelians in 2024. "Instead, the republic’s authorities cut the number of pages in Karelian and Finnish-language newspapers and switched them to black-and-white printing—to save money," reports newspaper 7x7. In 2022, the Karelian Election Commission refused activists’ request to print ballots in Karelian and Vepsian, arguing that the indigenous population already has full access to their native language and that election materials did not require translation.

Officially, the obstacle to granting Karelian official status is its use of the Latin alphabet: Russian law requires all state languages to use Cyrillic. Potashov argues that this technicality could have been resolved over the past 35 years, but under current conditions, advancing the language agenda is impossible.

"Karelians have been pushed out of political representation in the republic. There are no Karelian national politicians in Karelia. Their role has been reduced to folkloric figures—it’s fine to remember Karelian kalitki [traditional potato pirogs] during national holidays and dance in circles, but when the issue of the Karelian language’s status arises, the republican authorities hide behind federal law," Potashov emphasises.

He adds that any mention of regional identity or the status of the Karelian language is viewed by the federal centre as an attempt at separatism.

"The situation was fueled by Mr. Nikolai Patrushev, who, over the past decade, has repeatedly warned of so-called Finnish revanchists dreaming of ‘taking Karelia back.’ So, partly for this reason, republican authorities are erring on the side of caution—even when there’s no real threat," Potashov says.

In his view, most Karelians will support Yabloko’s initiative. However, as he notes, Karelians now make up less than 10% of the republic’s population. "The majority won’t be aggressively opposed—they’ll just be passively indifferent," he concludes.