Sandra over at the International Adoption Blog took a look last week at International Mother Languages Day, a commemoration set up by UNESCO in 1999. It's an interesting post to read if you love languages the way I do, but also because of what she brings out about Russia at the end.

I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that there were a lot of languages in Russia besides Russian. I don’t think there's a country on the planet that's home to just one language: My trips to Italy often involved listening to Sicilian, Calabrese, Neapolitan, Piemontese and Venetian, in addition to standard Italian. Even France, which tries to be such a monolith on language, has speakers of Breton, Alsatian and other regional languages.

And the Soviet Union had brought a lot of other nationalities under its tent. While ethnic Russians dominate the population of Russia today, they share the space with an estimate 160 ethnic groups and indigenous peoples. If your adoption involves a trip to Kazan or Chelyabinsk, you may hear something that sounds more like Turkish than Russian because some people in those areas speak the Tatar language. (You won't notice any differences in written language because all of Russia's ethnic groups must use the Cyrillic alphabet.)

At the bottom of Sandra's post is a link to a remarkable story from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty about Russia's indigenous languages. Rather than just describe the languages, and the pressures that are threatening to erase them, the author uses the power of the Internet to let you hear them. There's a song in the Selkup language, which is spoken by a small group of people in the regions of Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk. There's also a woman reading a poem in both Russian and Evenk, the language of another ethnic group in Siberia. The files were a bit slow to load on my computer, but everything is slow these days on my poor six-year-old Dell.

Give the story a listen.