... having been breathed out

Mr. Vasya Gabov (born 1951), the youngest fluent speaker of [Siberian language] Ös and our expedition guide, felt particularly pained by the fact that Ös had never been allowed to have an alphabet. Like Sequoyah, the native Cherokee scholar who invented writing for his people in 1809, Vasya was determined to bring the technology of writing to his people in their own language. In the Soviet Union, alphabets were designed and bestowed by Russian scientists, and the political decisions about which minority peoples could have letters were made in Moscow. It would have been a punishable offense to invent your own alphabet, so the Ös did without.

Vasya and his peers told us how they had been made fun of for being dark-skinned native children among blond Russians in elementary school. They had also, he recounted, been made to feel ashamed of their language and forbidden to speak it. Under such pressures, he and his generation made the decision [...] to avoid using Ös and speak exclusively in Russian. Ös children like Vasya made this decision at the very young age of 5 or 6, not realizing it presaged the loss of their ancestral language. They were concerned with how to fit in, be accepted, and avoid ridicule for being different.

Vasya grew up to be a successful worker in Soviet society, married and had children, and worked as a truck driver. A born outdoorsman, he never lost his love of hunting and would spend weeks at a time out hunting bears, moose, and other animals. At night, sitting alone in a small log cabin in the forest, he made an audacious decision—he would keep a hunting journal in his own native Ös language. Of course, he—like all Ös adults—knew how to read and write in Russian. But Ös has four sounds not found in Russian. Since Vasya was not a trained linguist, he decided that he would not invent four new letters for these sounds, but would simply use new combinations of Russian letters he already knew.

After some time Vasya worked out his new writing system and began to make regular entries in his journal. He was motivated in part by something his mother had said to him as a young boy: "My mother told me that it is necessary to speak our Ös language... let the Russians speak Russian and let the Ös speak Ös." This expression of linguistic pride inspired him to keep writing and perhaps even dare to think that Ös might be passed on to his children's generation. But Vasya's journal was ill fated.

One day Vasya got up his courage and showed his journal—containing three years' worth of entries painstakingly written—to a Russian friend. The Russian's reaction was devastating for him. "What are you writing there, in what language?" the friend demanded. "Why would you write in Ös?" When Vasya yeard these disdainful words, he felt as if he had done something wrong. The shame of the schoolyard and stigma of being different came back to him. In a fit of pique, he threw his journal—the first and only book ever written in his native Ös tongue—out into the forest to rot. "I might have wanted to show it to you," he told me in 2003, "but it's not here, it's still there where I threw it away."

—K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge

(Gabov does go on to resuscitate his Ös orthography and collaborates with Harrison and local (Russian-monolingual) Ös kids on a children's book in his language, the first and possibly only ever published Ös book. However: still an incredibly sad story.)