For similar reasons that people in the US no longer speak German, Dutch or various British Isle dialects (and the reason after a couple generations, Spanish speaking immigrants are more fluent in English than Spanish).

There are parts of the US that still have German-language newspapers. Detroit had a Dutch newspaper until 2018. Whether it closed because it was Dutch or because newspapers as a product are on the decline is academic; the point is that people in the US do speak German, Dutch, and various British Isle dialects, and furthermore there are third-, fourth- and more-generation Spanish-speaking people throughout the south and west. It's a big country, and a lot happens outside your neighborhood.

Yeah, but a lot of it has (unfortunately) dissapeared. Especially during the anti-German episode related to WWII. Assimilation happens by various means.

US didn't annex the Germans or the Dutch into their country. Stop pretending that russia somehow grew peacefully.

Did the US grew peacefully? I mean all the territory of the United States was taken from Native Americans. Do you get as agitated about this as you are about Russia?

But Native Americans weren't Dutch, were they? Immigrants CHOSE to come to the USA and CHOSE to adapt. A bit different in case of most russian minorities.

If you consider what the Americans did to the natives bad (which you should) you should be as concerned for russian minorities. This "if Americans are bad, we should be allowed to be bad as well" take is tiresome.

What exactly should I be concerned about?

Disappearing small languages? I am, but what about it is specific to Russia?

"This "if Americans are bad, we should be allowed to be bad as well" take is tiresome."

Of course it is tiresome. Especially after you say 'American history is good, Russian history is bad' and get reminded about Native Americans. So tiresome!

the world is not that different in some ways than five hundred years ago.. there are literate people and illiterate people, on a large scale. The rise and fall of literate languages is not the same story as the number of people that speak a language, or what colors are on the local police car. It is not popular to speak of this in the USA since there is a "unifying myth" of equality. What the USA did do brilliantly is use markets and local jurisdictions to let warring people settle nearby each other, and thrive. Over time the old ways show up however. Evolution is not practiced uniformly.

You seem to have an answer. Would you mind sharing it?

Systematic genocide.

Care to elaborate?

The current genocide against Ukrainian-ness is one example.

Some other examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

What I've seen look like war crimes, what is the argument for qualifying them as genocide?

Stalin's (and bolshevik's in general) crimes are horrible, but ethnic Russians weren't safe from them either. Have you seen breakdown of their victims by ethnicity?

The point is that Russia is the largest country by land area, composed of a great many regions and ethnicities, and yet all the language-speakers have vanished.

This didn't happen by accident. It is the result of a program of systematic, violent, erasure.

"yet all the language-speakers have vanished"

Now that is just false. [0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Russia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_of_Russia

The most common non-Russian language is spoken by just 3% of the population.

All others are below 1%.

Which is order of magnitude higher than, for example, in Canada, where less than 1% in total speak indigenous languages. [0]

Or look at Poland where only 1.8% in total speak a language other than Polish. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada#Indigenous... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Poland

The lengths this guy will go to, to deny his country's ethno-fascist roots. Russian-exceptionalism is a hard drug to come down from.