Ashley Elizabeth McDermott

ASHLEY McDERMOTT, then a graduate student at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, was approved funding in April 2022 to aid research on “The Production of Endangerment: Language Socialization, Shift, and Discourses of Kyrgyz Loss in Post-Soviet Bishkek,” supervised by Dr. Barbra Meek. Why do adults in Bishkek fear that their children are growing up to be Russian-speakers, when by all international measures of linguistic vitality, Kyrgyz is not in danger of shift? This project addresses concerns of shift in Bishkek by exploring the range of global networks of socialization that families experience. This research considers quantitative and qualitative data collected from the myriad on/offline sites, showing that both adults’ perceptions of shift and changes in children’s linguistic practices are due to the content, ideas, and discourses that reach them through digital infrastructure, face-to-face interactions, and schools in a network of socialization. While pressures from children’s sociolinguistic environments cause them to prefer Russian, children’s preference for and everyday interactions in Russian are reinforced by material provided to them through interactions with recommendation algorithms online. The results of this research have implications for how language endangerment and vitality are assessed in situations of shift–a change which could affect the attention and resources allocated to languages that are not considered endangered by international standards but demonstrate signs of shift locally.