Abstract
ABSTRACT Until recently, not only students of the titular nationalities (ethnicities) learned their native language but also ethnic Russians and other nationalities in some ethnic republics of Russia had to learn titular state languages of those republics. The political campaign in Russia against the compulsory teaching of state languages of republics started two years ago and culminated in the adoption of the amendment to the Russian education law on 3 August 2018. The law enacted some additional mechanisms to ensure the voluntary study of non-Russian languages. The law adoption signified the escalation of the conflict around linguistic rights and the compulsory study of state language. The problem is that the official discources typically overshadow the discourses of individuals and non-govenrmental ogranization who have their own language attitudes and agendas, which distorts the depiction of the conflict. In this paper, we will study official and public discourses together, combining the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ perspectives, in order to explore both the language policy and language ideologies, and, thus, to provide a multifaceted picture of the conflict. We use policy analysis and discourse analysis to study official documents, surveys, mass media, social media discussions.
Highlights
Russia is nominally a federal state that consists of republics, autonomous districts and regular administrative regions
The authorities referred to the opinions of parents who portrayed teaching of the titular languages to be at the expense of Russian
The ethno-demographic structure of the population in the republic is composed of 29.5% Bashkirs, which is more than Tatars (25.4%), but less than ethnic Russians (36.1%)[36], while the Russians and Tatars have a much higher proportion of the urban population
Summary
The activity of Russianspeaking parents who opposed the compulsory study of titular languages increased.[16] the authorities referred to the opinions of parents who portrayed teaching of the titular languages to be at the expense of Russian Such arguments were part of the official discourse that emphasises the deteriorating position of the Russian language abroad and in some republics of Russia, its ‘degradation’ in political and socio-economic terms, the worsening of its knowledge and its ‘contamination with the foreign words’ as well as ‘the factual displacement of Russian from the school curricula in favour of the national language’. For defining ‘compatriots living abroad’, the lowest denominator in the Russian nationalist discourse abroad is the Russian language.[22]
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