The delicate relationship between language, culture, ecology and religion in Northern identity and mentality is a very exciting interdisciplinary field which, however has so far remained outside deeper scholarly interests. The reciprocity is very intimate in the contemporary North where many languages are in the process of dying out. Cultural values expressed by religion play a great role in this painful process of ethnic death or survival. Experiences achieved in the Project on Endangered Languages have shown that when a language is dying out, it often breaths its last breath of life in religious codes, in man's interaction with the other world. These codes are sacred. They become manifest in the mother tongue only and are secret to the others who are ignorant about messages transmitted in this kind of internal communication.

Religion plays a crucial role in the new ethnic developments all over the world. Various languages in the North are in general so small and their differences so great that nation building in the Arctic isolation has come quite late. Ethnicity looks for new forms in the way which has recently taken place among the Sakha or Yakut in Central Siberia, the Nentsy and Khanty in Northwestern Siberia or the Komi on the western side of the Uralic Mountains where Pre-Christian folk religion, “shamanism” in particular, has been declared to be the official national religion of the republic or the district.