■ Kathryn E. Graber Department of Anthropology & Department of Central Eurasian Studies Indiana University graberk@indiana.edu The Kitchen, the Cat, and the Table: Domestic Affairs in Minority-Language Politics This article examines ideological constructions of the domestic sphere in metalinguistic commentary about loss in Buryat, a contracting language of Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Although calling Buryat “just a kitchen language” suggests that the kitchen is linguistically devalued, a popular joke told among bilingual speakers and its use-in-context show that kitchens can also be invoked to positively demarcate an inner sphere of comfortable, “offstage” interaction, to authenticate otherwise derided ways of speaking, and to build solidarity. The kitchen emerges as a complex discursive resource for commenting on—and for re-creating—pragmatic rules for the use of different codes and registers. [multilingualism, register, humor, performance, Russia] Introduction T he domestic sphere, and particularly women in the domestic sphere, play a central and challenging role in discourse about language loss. Language- revitalization activists have often focused their efforts on the home as a—if not the—site of intergenerational transmission. At the same time, home and hearth frequently figure in scholarship on language as a domain of limitation: as the beginning of a nascent-but-not-(yet)-fully functional pidgin; as the island-like repository of speakers living in diaspora; or, perhaps most often, as the last bastion of a dying language. In the literature on language endangerment, obsolescence, and death, references to “domestic” languages and domestic-sphere usage abound, giving the impression of a teleological trajectory in a language’s use, not just from greater domain differentiation to less but, more specifically, from a wide variety of public contexts to a narrower range of private contexts (Dorian 2014:326; Moore 1988:453). Although patterns vary, the collective conclusion from research on language loss is inescapable: restriction to private-sphere interactions is where a language ends. This article focuses on ideological constructions of the domestic sphere in metalinguistic commentary about loss in Buryat, an indigenous, contracting language of Siberia. Buryat speakers strongly differentiate between a standard literary register and colloquial ways of speaking. When I learned Buryat as an adult doing fieldwork in the Lake Baikal region, my tutors focused on the standard literary language, drawing on their expertise in linguistics to explain verb morphology and having me Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 27, Issue 2, pp. 151–170, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. Copyright © 2017 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12154. 151