Mother tongue education at school and need for development of educational materials

3.2 Mother tongue education at school and need for development of educational materials

It has been mentioned that Rutul is not taught at schools in Azerbaijan due to the lack of teachers and educational materials. However, Azerbaijani law encourages minority language development and mother tongue education: Article 11 of the Law “On culture” mentions assistance for development and preservation of a national culture. The state guarantees development and preservation of national culture of the people of Azerbaijan, including cultural originality of all national minorities living in the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan. According to the Article 6 of the Law “About Education” adopted on 7 October of 1992 and Article 3 of the Law “About official language” education may be carried out in different languages of national minorities. 6 In accordance with these rights, several individuals in the community expressed the desire to work towards developing materials and establishing basic mother tongue literacy classes at local schools. It has been mentioned already that the communities in Azerbaijan speak the Shin-Shorsu dialect that is defined and very distinct from the other dialects. They are indeed aware of their own people that live in Dagestan, and that they share ethnic identity with them. However, there is very little sense of belonging together due to the geographical and political border between the communities, distinct linguistic differences, and lack of strong connections and communications. As mentioned, research by Yurkova 2012 shows that the Shin-Shorsu dialect is autonomous, and sociolinguistically should be treated separately. It seems reasonable to consider Mukhad and Shin-Shorsu speakers as belonging to different communities both in linguistic and in sociolinguistic terms; therefore development of separate materials is justified. Brown 1998:24, discussing the importance and foundation of the sociolinguistic method, states that it should “pay attention to the people themselves, what they know about their own language situation, and how they want to see it develop.” So the idea of Shin-Shorsu speakers of Azerbaijan developing their own literacy materials rather than using the materials from the Dagestani side is reasonable.

3.3 Rutul phonology overview