October 22 is the International Stuttering Awareness Day. It has been celebrated since 1998. This date is intended to raise public awareness of the problems faced by millions of people who stutter. According to various estimates, there are from 70 to 100 million of them in the world. Every year, communities and associations of people with stuttering around the world hold events and information campaigns to highlight how certain aspects of society can be difficult for people who stutter. To reduce negative attitudes and discrimination, to debunk myths that stuttering people are inferior to others in intelligence or have a more difficult character.
In Yakutia, the community of people with stuttering was created in 2020, it coordinates its work through a group in Telegram and Facebook. Please share these links with people who stutter.
In honor of this date, we want to present a short film "The Stutterer" by the Irish director Benjamin Cleary.
The movie won Best Live Action Short Film at the 88th Academy Awards in 2016. Greenwood, a lonely typographer, struggles to overcome his speech impediment while trying to build a romantic relationship. News.Ykt.Ru and the Yakutia Stuttering Society community highly recommend this film for watching.
In 2021, Sinet Spark launched the Problems of Stuttering program, which supports projects such as the creation of mutual support groups for stuttering, the search and testing of speech techniques for controlling stuttering, and grant support for international leading research groups on the topic of stuttering. For example, a technology startup Fluenta.AI which is designed to help people with stuttering through machine learning technology. In 2020 and 2021, grants for research in this area were received by the Sydney University of Technology and the University of Michigan. Among the famous stuttering Yakut people are: technological entrepreneurs Arsen Tomsky and the Ushnitsky brothers, film directors Dmitry Davydov and Stepan Burnashev, and a number of other well-known representatives of intellectual and creative fields of work.