Post-Ottoman Turkey holds the distinction of being the only country that made Circassians forget their mother tongue. After the 1864 Circassian exodus scattered the community across alien lands, members of Circassian associations would grumble in closed-door meetings, “Turkey, a country we fought for, made us forget our language, but Russia, the country that exiled us, let our language live on.”
I saw what they meant when I first traveled to the Caucasus. In the media house in Cherkessk, the capital of the Russian Federation’s Karachay-Cherkess Republic, a separate newspaper was published on each floor: in Russian, Adyghe, in Karachay, Nogai and Abaza. I visited all of them and listened to their stories. The signs on public buildings were posted in five languages. In an autonomous republic of fewer than 500,000 people, the languages of the autochthonous peoples were all officially recognized, alongside the predominantly spoken Russian. The same goes for the other autonomous republics. In the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, for instance, the languages of the three major communities — Kabardian (Adyghe), Balkar and Russian — have official status. For each community, there is even a state-funded theater performing in its respective language.
