The idea of the comprehensive research collection, the Perils of “linguistic impoverishment,” and print publications in the Turkic languages of the north Caucasus, 1806–2017 (Part I)

Publications in the Turkic languages of the North Caucasus (Kumyk, Karachai-Balkar, Nogai, and a few others) are intelligible to readers of Turkish, Tatar, Kazakh, and other more commonly taught Turkic languages, but have suffered from serious neglect as sources for Western scholarship and, concomitantly, as materials that Western libraries might want to acquire. This is largely due to three factors: a lack of awareness on the part of scholars and librarians that publications in these languages exist; a lack of awareness that these publications have scholarly value at least as high as that of publications commonly cited in scholarly works about Islam in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, etc.; and the difficulty (especially in the past) of acquiring materials in these languages via the established acquisitions networks of Western libraries. Part of a planned series of articles exploring the publication history of and bibliographic record for the languages of the North Caucasus, this article will use language family (e.g., Turkic) as the unit of analysis, rather than the ethnoterritorial units created during the Soviet period (i.e., Kabardino-Balkaria) or in earlier eras (i.e., Daghestan). More broadly, the (quite understandable) failure of Western libraries to amass comprehensive collections in the vernacular languages of the North Caucasus raises interesting questions regarding the nature and purpose of the contemporary research library, which will be explored as well.