Preservation of Traditional Tatar Culture in Public Discourse: A Content Analysis of Academic and Media Sources

The article examines how elements of traditional Tatar culture are represented in contemporary public discourse through academic and media texts. The object of the study is public textual communication devoted to the preservation of Tatar culture, while the subject of the study is the distribution of key cultural categories in academic publications and media materials. The empirical corpus includes twelve sources from two genre groups: six academic articles and six media or official publications issued between 2021 and 2026. The research is based on quantitative content analysis using a unified system of categories: language, traditions, identity, family, spirituality, cultural heritage, and historical or ancestral memory. The unit of analysis is the sentence; category frequencies were calculated in absolute and relative terms to ensure comparability between sources of different sizes. The results reveal a stable thematic asymmetry between academic and media discourse. Academic texts demonstrate a multi-component structure with a predominance of traditions and cultural heritage, as well as consistent attention to language and identity. Media and official texts, by contrast, tend to focus on a limited number of symbolic themes, most often spirituality or identity, while family and historical or ancestral memory remain marginal. This imbalance limits the visibility of everyday and intergenerational mechanisms of cultural transmission in public communication. The study highlights the risk of reducing cultural representation to event-based and symbolic narratives and underlines the importance of broader thematic coverage. The findings may be used for monitoring cultural policy, designing communication strategies, and conducting comparative studies of cultural representation in public discourse.