This Language in Russia is Going Extinct | Karelia 🇫🇮 🇷🇺

Join me on a journey to the the extreme north of Russia, to the Republic of Karelia.

In this video, I set out from my hotel room in Vyborg towards Sortavala, a small Karelian town of 20,000 people not far from the border with Finland. I only have one goal during my time in Karelia: meeting with Karelian people and possibly hear some Karelian language.

In my quest to set foot in every single federal subject in Russia, the region of Karelia was number 23.

Here's where I stand as of now:

Moscow ✔️
Moscow Oblast' ✔️
Saint Petersburg ✔️
Leningradskaya Oblast' ✔️
Vladimirskaya Oblast' ✔️
Yaroslavskaya Oblast' ✔️
Ivanovskaya Oblast' ✔️
Krasnodarskij Kraj ✔️
Tulskaya Oblast' ✔️
Tatarstan Republic ✔️
Tverskaya Oblast' ✔️
Nizhegorodskaya Oblast' ✔️
Kaluzhskaya Oblast' ✔️
Murmanskaya Oblast' ✔️
Smolenskaya Oblast' ✔️
Ryazanskaya Oblast' ✔️
Astrakhanskaya Oblast' ✔️
Kalmykia Republic ✔️
Volgogradskaya Oblast' ✔️
Bryanskaya Oblast' ✔️
Udmurtia Rebublic ✔️
Yekaterinburgskaya Oblast' ✔️
Tyumenskaya Oblast' ✔️
Karelia Republic ✔️

Which means I'm at 24/85. Still 61 to go! Hopefully a lifetime will be enough ⚠️

Let me tell you, finding Karelian people wasn't an easy task, although I was in Karelia. Almost impossible, in the city of Sortavala. What I understood from talking to locals is that Karelians make up only 10% of the population of Karelia, and they are concentrated in some villages and small towns in the northern parts of Karelia, like for example Olonets. Still, I was very determined in at least reading about the Karelian culture so I spent the whole day looking around and asking people what they could tell me about Karelians.

I visited a couple of museums, and I was very unlucky in one because I was told that there was indeed a worker there of Karelian origin, but she had her day off right while I was in Karelia! She would have been back the following day, but my time in Karelia was of course very limited. The closest I got to meeting with a pure Karelian was a man at the museum who told me about his babushka who was Karelian. He also told me a few interesting things, like her grandmother speaking Karelian which was not appreciated by Russians.

Although I met zero Karelian people, I had the great idea to pay a visit to the library of the town of Sortavala and sure enough I was rewarded with the largest collection ever of Karelian dictionaries and textbooks! I spent a good half an hour at the library chatting to people there (all of them were Russians and not Karelian of course) about my experience as a tourist in Sortavala, and then reading the Russian-Karelian bilingual dictionaries. In this way I learnt some Karelian words, which was great! Speaking to a woman there I also found out that Karelian is very similar to Finnish: the lady knew Finnish and could recognise some words in Karelian because of it.

Karelian and Finnish were originally the same language but when Karelian culture sphere was split in 1323 Peace of Nöteborg (pähkinäsaari) between Novgorod and Sweden, Karelian began to take more from East-Slavic/Russian and Finnish from East-Norse/Swedish. So that's why many people consider Karelian to be a sort of mix between Finnish and Russian.

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I started making videos for Youtube when I was a university student. I was always trying to find cheap getaways to do some traveling in spite of the adversities put in place by being a broke university student living on their own! Traveling became more and more a fundamental passion of mine, and now that I'm gradually moving on to make a job out of it I couldn't be happier, and I can only continue making this kind of videos both for mine and your enjoyment!

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Видео This Language in Russia is Going Extinct | Karelia 🇫🇮 🇷🇺 канала Dave Le Genda