We have been challenged with those questions recently: 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 arts of mother language and the native craft alive and vibrant?

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/

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.