Quite apart from its problems in the Caucasian republics, Russian imperial overreach has left it vulnerable to sporadic outbreaks of Siberian nationalism. This is fomented by Russian and Ukrainian (deportee) colonists rather than by so-called aboriginal peoples, focuses on the pitiful rewards for the local population accruing from the massive extraction of mineral wealth in the territories they inhabit, and defines itself in Wilsonian terms with reference to differences between Siberian Slav dialects and standard Russian. Since these are miniscule and inconsistent, efforts have been underway for a number of years (I think more or less since 1989) to devise a normalised Siberian Slav, whose impact on ethnic brotherhood could be considerably more exciting than the breakup of Serbo-Croatian given the interests at stake.

However for the moment internet is the battleground, and much Cainite fun is to be had there. Siberian nationalists were for a while active on Wikipedia, following the Catalan recipe of creating large numbers of articles to demonstrate their inalienable right to more bureaucracy and international footie against Mongolia on Wednesday nights. On this page Russian nationalists successfully close them down, and one Nikola notes that the Slav languages (Romance scholars, even in Spain, would probably call them dialects) are

so similar that even I, and certainly any Russian speaker will understand it even clearer, can see that, in the article on Hamlet in Siberian Wikipedia, Francisco’s line Stand: who’s there? is “translated” like Stop! Who’s there, fucking mother?

Nice try, Nikola, but that’s a blatantly Russophile Western Siberian fifth columnist interpretation. Proximity to the emerging geopolitical surreality known as Sarah Palin means that we should run with the standard Eastern Siberian variant and read it as motherfucker.

Tags: dialect, dialectophobia, gas, Hamlet, mineral, nationalism, oil, Russia, Russian, Shakespeare, Siberia, Siberian language, Slav, translation
Categories: Empires, rulers and warfare, Languages, Les bourgeois, Monsters, Stones and metals

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1. MM
   January 24th 2010 12:42

   I see one of the comments to Gamlet also refers to King Lire (hope this is not too off topic):

   http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058126/

   Good bits on youtube, although the subtitles seem to be in an ancient dialect.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUmP-gvaQ8g

2. Trevor
   January 25th 2010 07:49

   That’s good stuff, but not to be outdone here’s a chunk of Serb Hamlet, from the Yugoslav Youth Theatre: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcYaq2LcTEE

   I think that excluding film versions Hamlet is by far Shakespeare’s most popular work in the Slav lands. I’d like to be able to find non-obvious reasons for that.