The Kalmyks
The Kalmyks are an ethnolinguistic group belonging to a larger group of Mongols known as the Oirats. Once a confederation of nomadic states, since the 18th century, the Oirats have been scattered as ethnic minorities in Mongolia, China, and Russia.
In the 17th century, a subgroup of the Oirat, the Torghuts, founded the Kalmyk Khanate in the Lower Volga River region. Traditionally, Kalmyks were engaged in mobile pastoralism, which was perfectly suited for the vast steppe climate of their territories.
In 1920, the Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast was formed, which later became the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1935. As a result of the Russian Civil War and the Stalinist repression of the 1920s and 1930s, the population of Kalmykia was almost halved. The Siberian exile of 1943-57, which resulted in the death of nearly one-third of the entire population, inflicted irreversible demographic and cultural losses.
Before the October Revolution, there used to be over a hundred khuruls (Kalmyk Buddhist temples) where 2,700 Buddhist monks lived and served. By 1940, all these khuruls had been destroyed and the monks repressed. One of the few survivors, the Kalmyk monk Geshe Vangyal (1901-83), became one of the first teachers of Tibetan Buddhism in the USA.
Historically, the Kalmyk-American diaspora was formed by immigrants escaping the Russian Revolution and World War II. The main Kalmyk settlement was Howell, New Jersey.
The Kalmyk Language
Халмг келəн (hal'mg kelän), also known as Kalmyk-Oirat or simply Kalmyk, is a Mongolic language spoken primarily in the Republic of Kalmykia in the Russian Federation. According to a 2010 census, of the 170,000 ethnic Kalmyks living in the Russian Federation, there were an estimated 80,000 native speakers. More recent numbers, as well as the vitality of Kalmyk in the Kalmyk-American diasporic community, are unknown.
The Kalmyk language has survived many challenges, including the devastating exile of its people to Siberia in 1943-1957, which resulted in many lives lost. In 1924 the Soviet state abolished the original Kalmyk writing system known as todo bichig, created by Zaya-Pandita, and replaced it with Latin, and eventually with Cyrillic. More recently, in 2018, officials made studying Kalmyk as part of the school curriculum in Kalmykia optional. Most, if not all, Kalmyk speakers are bilingual speakers of Russian, and a majority of them are aged.
Ghilyana Dordzhieva
Ghilyana is an ethnomusicologist and a researcher of traditional Kalmyk music. She is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Mongol-American Cultural Association (MACA). Previously, in 2002-2006, she lectured on the music of ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and the Saint Petersburg State University for Art and Culture.
Ghilyana is the author of various scientific articles, a CD titled ‘Tsagan’, and a book titled ‘Протяжные песни калмыков: История одного сюжета’. Her work is dedicated to traditional Kalmyk music, long songs known as ut dun and oral stories. Ghilyana has conducted long-term fieldwork in Kalmykia in the 1990s by directly observing and interacting personally with native Kalmyk speakers. By recording folklore and traditional musicians, Ghilyana connected with the beauty of the Kalmyk language and and gained a deeper understanding of her mother tongue. She would like to share her passion and joy of learning, understanding, and communicating in her mother tongue, and wishes to aid and unite elder, proficient speakers with younger generations who want to learn Kalmyk.
Darina
Gedeeva
Darina is a researcher of Kalmyk at Kalmyk State University in Elista, Russia. Her research interests include lexicography and lexicology, toponymy, ethnography, and the Kalmyk-Oirat language used in business and legal documents of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Darina has published widely on Kalmyk linguistics and history. Her works include ‘Spelling rules and spelling dictionary of the Kalmyk language’ (1999), ‘Practical course of the Kalmyk language. Part I’ (2011, co-author), ‘Brief Kalmyk-Russian dictionary’ (2013. co-author), ‘Dictionary of toponyms of the Republic of Kalmykia’ (2019, co-author), ‘Vocabulary of material culture in Kalmyk business documents of the 18th century’ (2020), and ‘Meanings of the word tamaγa in 18-century Kalmyk administrative documents’ (2022).
Darina has had over 30 years of experience teaching the modern Kalmyk language and the traditional Kalmyk script, todo bichig. She also practices historical Mongolian archery as a hobby, and has participated in many competitions.
JJ
Lim
JJ is a Singaporean linguist whose research interests include syntactic theory, linguistic fieldwork, and language variation and change. His work is informed by collaborative fieldwork with native speakers of Khalkha Mongolian, Kalmyk Oirat, and Singlish. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Linguistics, University of California San Diego.
In this project, JJ is interested in creating educational resources for the study and preservation of the Kalmyk language, especially in the Kalmyk-American diaspora. Through close collaboration with native Kalmyk speakers, he hopes to better understand the grammar of Kalmyk, and to develop an infrastructure for members of the Kalmyk community to teach and learn the language.