This indigenous language survived the Russian occupation. Can he survive on YouTube?

When an anthropologist researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, and says many people expressed the same concern: Children were losing touch with their native language. This Central Asian nation of 7 million was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but the Kyrgyz (pronounced Kurgyz) language survived and remains widely spoken among adults.

McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she has also heard that some children in Kyrgyz-dominated rural villages have learned to speak Russian spontaneously. Adults largely blamed one force: YouTube.

McDermott and a team of five researchers from four universities in the United States and Kyrgyzstan have released new research that they believe proves concerns about YouTube’s influence are valid. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected nearly 11,000 unique search results and video suggestions.

What they found was that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular children’s interests, such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids, often did not yield Kyrgyz-language content. Even after watching 10 videos of children featuring Kyrgyz speech to show a strong desire for it, the simulated users received fewer recommendations in Kyrgyz on what to watch next, compared to bots showing no preference for the language at all. The results show that YouTube prioritizes Russian-language content over Kyrgyz-language videos, especially when searching or browsing children’s topics, according to the researchers.

“Kyrgyz children are algorithmically created to be audiences for Russian content,” Neil Escher, co-author and postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, said during a presentation at the school last week. “There’s no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”

McDermott recalls one frustrated Kyrgyz mother in 2023, who explained that she paid her internet bill one day late every month so she could regularly spend one day without the internet and, by extension, YouTube at home.

YouTube, which is “committed to amplifying Indigenous voices,” did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The researchers are trying to meet with YouTube’s parental controls team to discuss the possibility of using language filters, according to Escher.

The researchers say their work is the latest to show how online platforms can reinforce colonial culture and influence offline behavior. Under Soviet control, people in Kyrgyzstan had to learn Russian to succeed. Today, many adults are fluent in both Russian and Kyrgyz, with Russian remaining important for trade. Children are required to learn at least some Kyrgyz at school. But many people spend several hours a day online, and watching YouTube is the main activity, McDermott says. Quoting Russian-language videos is common, whether it’s creator refrains like “let’s do the challenge,” tweaking American words like “nag,” or parroting accents and syntax.

In one of the researchers’ experiments, they searched for several topics written in the same way in Russian and Kyrgyz, including: Harry Potter and Minecraft. The results were mostly Russian. Overall, only 2.7% of the videos analyzed by the research team appeared to include people of Kyrgyz origin.

YouTube “socializes young people to view Russian as the default language of entertainment and technology and to view Kyrgyz as uninteresting,” the researchers wrote in a self-published paper accepted at a social computing conference scheduled for October.

Researchers say there is ample children’s content in the Kyrgyz language that YouTube could promote. In 2024, the 35th most viewed channel on YouTube worldwide was D Billions, a kids-focused content studio based in Kyrgyzstan with a dedicated Kyrgyz language channel with nearly 1 million subscribers.