Johnson's
25 October 2006
A World Security Institute Project
www.worldsecurityinstitute.org
JRL homepage: www.cdi.org/russia/johnson
#8
October 25, 2006
Language of Lenin Losing Ground
By Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writer
BISHKEK,
22-year-old waitress at an outdoor
cafe, boasts
that she is the only one of 10
siblings in her family who speaks Russian.
"I learned it here by myself,
in town, because I
am smart," Kalimbetova said,
speaking slowly with
a heavy accent, confusing her verb
endings and pronouns.
But she concedes she's at a
disadvantage compared
to earlier generations. "My
mother speaks Russian
better because she studied in
school," she said.
Kalimbetova never had a chance to
study Russian
in school because, coming from
most depressed region, she never
went to school.
She is not alone. Like Kalimbetova,
millions of
young men and women in the former
and its former satellite states are
either unable
or opting not to study the language
of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lenin.
While the numbers have been slipping
since the
Soviet collapse, the decline of
Russian speakers
is now beginning to be felt more
acutely around the world.
Indeed, by 2025, according to a
recent study by
the Center for Demography and Human
Ecology at
the Russian
people speaking Russian will be
roughly equal to
that at the beginning of the last
century.
For now, Russian is the
fourth-most-spoken
language on earth, behind English,
Chinese and
Spanish, according to the center's
figures. In
not counting newborns. Another 26.4
million
citizens of former Soviet republics
are native
Russian speakers, and there are an
additional 7.5
million Russian speakers sprinkled
around the
globe. About 114 million people
speak Russian as a foreign language.
But the center projects that in a
decade, Russian
will be eclipsed by French, Hindu
and Arab and,
within the next 15 years, it will be
pushed to
10th place by Portuguese and
Bengali.
One obvious reason for the decline
is that
itself is shrinking, as the
population sheds 700,000 people every year.
Another factor is that, beyond
the prestige associated with the
language has
been ebbing since the country lost
its status as a global communist empire.
"As the geopolitical importance
of
degenerated to being little more
than a big
supplier of raw materials for other
countries'
growing high-tech economies, so did
the demand
for knowing Russian," said
Kirill Razlogov, an
analyst at the Institute for
Cultural Research.
In many former Soviet republics,
particularly in
the elite. "Now, with advancing
globalization,"
Razlogov said, "more people opt
for English
rather than Russian, deciding they'd
rather read
Shakespeare in his native tongue
rather than the Russian translation."
Turkmen leader Saparmurat Niyazov
has made the
anti-Russian movement state policy,
banning in
1995 the teaching of Russian at
almost all
universities and schools as well as
books, street
signs, posters and advertisements
that are printed in Russian.
Elsewhere in the former communist
world, the
anti-Russian trend is not quite so
draconian, but widespread.
From the Romanian capital of
Russian, is the language of commerce
and, in many cases, mass communication.
The Center for Demography and Human
Ecology
estimates that the number of
students studying
Russian in Eastern and
935,000 in 2004 from 10 million in
1990.
In the Baltics, where opposition to
the communist
regime was strongest and the first
Soviet
republics declared independence,
there has been
an unmistakable move away from
Russian.
In
status of a foreign language. And in
1999 law mandated that officials
communicate with
citizens only in Latvian, even in
those areas
with a majority of Russian speakers.
"We want to make Latvians out
of Russians,"
Latvian President Vaira
Vike-Freiberga was reported as saying in 2004.
While there are no restrictions on
learning or
speaking Russian in
suffers from a serious image
problem, as is the case elsewhere.
"Young people here don't associate
their career
aspirations with
Gutauskas, a professor at the Law
Institute of
instead to learn English, French and
German."
Likewise, Western students have lost
interest in studying Russian.
While a generation of young
Americans were urged
to study all things Russian in the
wake of the
1957 Sputnik launch, in 2004 a
paltry 27,000
chose to learn it, according to the
center's
figures. With
war on terrorism raging in the
central
are widely considered more useful.
Back in Bishkek, they seem to feel
the same way.
Within the walls of the private
American
University in
students from middle-class families
are more
likely to converse in English than
Russian.
But for those who hail from the
country's rural
precincts, where abject poverty,
backwardness and
a feudal Oriental civilization
predominates,
Russian may remain for some time a
symbol of progress and culture.
Shirin Narynbayeva, an
student with a round face,
explained: "I chose to
learn Russian so that no one would
ever think that I came from a village."
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