Donate

We have been pondering around very challenging questions: How to preserve a native language of minority culture of the stateless nation? The language that loses its speakers rapidly and, thus, making the oral, written, and artistic heritage unavailable for future generations? How to excite young generation to keep the mother tongue, to learn an ancient, endangered craft?

The Tatar language is among the many endangered languages that face existential challenges. The small Tatar diaspora of North America is trying to preserve the language by exciting the Tatar youth to learn, utilize and be proud of it. The Tatar Youth Scholarship has been created to generate interest in young American Tatars with any level of Tatar language proficiency to create projects that would engage the native tongue and educate the applicants and the community about the Tatar heritage.

If you

Find our endeavor worth your kind support, please consider donating: https://www.gofundme.com/f/tatar-youth-scholarship.

want to learn more about how and to who the scholarship will be awarded, please read the call for application page: https://sites.duke.edu/tatarsu/apply-to-the-scholarship-grant/.

want to get to know the Tatar language, take a summer course at Arizona State University: https://melikian.asu.edu/cli/tatar

want to discover unique shchitekler or so-called Tatar Boots: https://uniqueleathermosaic.com/museum-references/

Make Tatar Language Instruction a Possibility!

Please help us fund a Tatar Summer Camp to teach our language that is on the path of endangerment. You can Venmo via @ideliyakh or Paypal via @chulpankh.

There are around 5 million Tatar speakers worldwide but this number is rapidly declining. The resources for Tatar language instruction are limited. This summer camp is aimed to provide Tatar children an opportunity to engage with their native language. Collected funds will be directed to pay Tatar language teachers and cover their expenses.

Alima Academy, a non-profit online school that provides Tatar classes worldwide, is working on organising the Tatar Camp this summer. There are currently no camps for Tatar children outside of the Russian Federation, and efforts to support Tatar culture have been strained since the beginning of military actions in Ukraine.

Ideliya, Rafik and Chulpan are helping Alima Academy to raise funds to support Tatar language teachers. The Tatar language has been instrumental in connecting various Turkic people to carry on businesses and innovations for many centuries. The Tatar language has served as an intermediary between Turkic languages-speaking people populating Eurasian continent and has promoted successful collaborations and opportunities. It is important for Tatar language – as well as for any other endangered languages – to have encouraging opportunities for the younger generations to keep their mother tongues unitilized!

If you are interested to learn why it is essential to keep ancestral languages in use, consider reading the article by Brian McDermott, where he talks about Language Healers and the value of a heritage language as the most critical marker of the health of a community.