Both Shiri and Sanzhi are severely endangered for a number of reasons:

(1) Due to the resettlement, almost all speakers left their original villages. The way of life drastically changed. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a period of heavy Russification, with increasing pressure to make Russian the “second mother tongue” (Grenoble 2003: 58). This process was sustained by the formation of ‘mixed’ villages in the lowlands where people from many ethnic groups with different languages lived together. As a result, almost all Shiri and all Sanzhi people live in a multilingual environment in direct neighborhood with speakers of other Daghestanian languages (the only exceptions are those few Shiri speakers who are still living in Shiri). For these people the only lingua franca is Russian. Thus, in Chinar there are also Aguls, Tabasarans, Avars and other Daghestanian people. In Sanzhi live other Dargi people, Lezgians, Tabasarans, Aguls and Lak. In fact, our own observations of Shiri and Sanzhi families showed that the people speak Russian not only to their neighbors who usually do not understand their native varieties, but even at home. Especially younger generations, including small children, speak predominantly Russian with each other. Thus, the new generations either acquire Shiri or Sanzhi incompletely or they do not learn them at all. Although the people generally have a positive language attitude and are proud of speaking their own language, Russian is considered to be not only more prestigious, but extremely necessary for the future of the children. Parents tend to say that children automatically learn Shiri or Sanzhi in one way or another, for example when talking to their grandparents, but that it is much more important to learn Russian well right from the beginning.

(2) Since the Dargi languages are considered to be dialects they have no official status in Daghestan. Although literary standard Dargwa does have an official status, this is of no use for Shiri and Sanzhi speakers. The social life outside the household is dominated by Russian. The medium of instruction in schools is Russian, even in those villages that consist of one language community only. In some places (including the villages of Druzhba and Shiri), where there are enough Dargi children, a few hours of “mother tongue instruction” is offered in school (i.e. standard Dargwa), but in many places not even this is possible. Furthermore, the influence of Russian transmitted by the media cannot be overstated.

(3) Literary standard Dargwa has never become a lingua franca for Dargi people (except for the people who already speak Akusha), in contrast for example to the standard Avar language that existed already for a long time before the Soviet period. Dargi people used local linguae francae like Kumyk or Lak, and nowadays almost exclusively Russian. Shiri and Sanzhi speakers do not understand literary standard Dargwa. Young Shiri and Sanzhi people, who have Dargwa classes in school, usually do not really learn the language, because for them literary standard Dargwa is a foreign language without any further use.
(4) Another factor influencing the linguistic situation is marriages between women and men from different ethnic groups, which usually does not lead to bilingual children acquiring both the language of the mother and of the father, but to children speaking only Russian at home because the parents use Russian to communicate with each other. We estimate that there are only about 10 families left where both husband and wife are competent Sanzhi speakers and have grown up in the village of Sanzhi. Shiri people are somewhat more conservative, but the same tendency can be observed.

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