Language Policy of Local Communities in the "Non-Ethnic" Regions of Russia: the Case of Murmansk Oblast

The purpose of our work is to study the structure of the language policy of the local community of Komi-Izhemtsy in the village of Lovozero, Murmansk oblast. We will try to answer the following questions:(1) What role does language play in the construction of the diaspora? (2) How does the local language policy work in the absence of government support? The main material of this work is semi-structured and unstructured interviews collected by us during a field study in the village of Lovozero, Murmansk region, from January 20th to February 4th, 2024. The results of the study showed that in language policy in the absence of the state, the function of a certain “structuring” force can be performed by personal connections between actors who are able to build a system from the bottom up and ensure the existence of language in institutional contexts. In the context of a non-national region, issues of ethnic and linguistic policy descend to the lower levels of individual municipalities and rural settlements. This is also relevant for the Murmansk region, and our study was conducted in just such a “national” village. In the absence of government support, as well as language managers – people authorized to make decisions related to language – language initiatives are born from below, and it is worth noting that in this case they do not meet resistance from above (and may even find support).