The Kitchen, the Cat, and the Table: Domestic Affairs in Minority-Language Politics

This article examines ideological constructions of the domestic sphere in metalinguistic commentary about loss in Buryat, a contracting language of Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Although calling Buryat "just a kitchen language" suggests that the kitchen is linguistically devalued, a popular joke told among bilingual speakers and its use-in-context show that kitchens can also be invoked to positively demarcate an inner sphere of comfortable, "offstage" interaction, to authenticate otherwise derided ways of speaking, and to build solidarity. The kitchen emerges as a complex discursive resource for commenting on—and for re-creating—pragmatic rules for the use of different codes and registers.