Dagestan Is Building a Digital Library of Texts and Audio in the Languages of Its Peoples
Films in Avar, songs in Lak, and a century’s worth of issues of the newspaper Istina will soon be available online.
The government of the Republic of Dagestan has allocated 15 million rubles (approximately $ 184,000) to build a platform featuring materials in the region’s national languages. The project is expected to cover Avar, Dargin, Kumyk, Lezgin, Lak, and Tabasaran.
Platform Testing Gets Underway
The team plans to upload 50,000 pairs of parallel sentences to the platform. Alongside text, the project will include audio materials, studio recordings, and voice recordings of selected excerpts. The work is being carried out at the A.A. Takho-Godi Dagestan Research Institute of Pedagogy. Testing of the system’s technical version is already underway. The next step in expanding digital services in the republic’s national languages will be to adapt the interface of the Unified Portal of Public Services, Russia’s online government services platform.
A Century of Istina
Alongside the platform, Dagestan is building a digital archive of Istina, the republic’s oldest newspaper. Every issue published over the past century will be made available to the public. “We are digitizing the newspaper’s entire archive, going back to 1917. These are more than just old newspaper issues; they tell the story of the Avar people. The pages of Istina document people’s lives, major events, and the experiences of generations of Avars,” said the newspaper’s editor in chief, Temirkhan Gasanov.
To understand the scale of the undertaking, it helps to know the history of Istina. The newspaper first appeared in 1917 under the name Zaman, which it later changed several times. Until 1928, it was printed in Ajami, a writing system based on Arabic script. From 1928 to 1938, it used the Latin alphabet before switching to Cyrillic. Building a fully searchable digital archive means accounting for all three writing systems, as well as historical changes in the language.
A mobile app for the current Istina newspaper is also in development. It will offer a digital edition, news, podcasts, films, and animated films in Avar.
Digitizing materials in the republic’s national languages will help preserve its cultural diversity and make that heritage accessible to a much wider audience, particularly younger people who spend much of their lives in digital spaces. School and college students will be able to use historical publications for independent learning, including studying the language, local history, and culture. Researchers, journalists, and local historians, meanwhile, will be able to explore records of past events without having to consult bound volumes of printed newspapers.
Crowdsourcing Meets Professional IT Expertise
Dagestan is placing particular emphasis on its national languages. In August 2026, the republic’s Ministry of Digital Development announced that it was working on Dag Language Bot. The platform lets speakers of Avar, Dargin, Kumyk, Lezgin, Lak, and Tabasaran contribute translations of texts, helping build digital language resources. But crowdsourcing alone will not be enough. Preserving this linguistic heritage also requires professionals, not just linguists but IT experts as well. For technology companies, developing natural language processing (NLP) tools for languages with little online representation is a potentially promising new field.
The project also matters at the national level, offering a model for digitizing the cultural heritage of a multiethnic country. Its approach could be applied in other Russian regions with their own national languages, including Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Yakutia, and the republics of the North Caucasus and Siberia. Wider adoption of these technologies could help establish a domestic market for software designed to work with less widely spoken languages.
