Language Ideology and Language Conflict in Post-Soviet Belarus

Abstract

Post-Soviet Belarus has been described as ‘a land of ethnolinguistic paradoxes’ (Rudovich 1998). The language of the titular nationality, despite its official status as a state language (alongside Russian before 1990 and again since 1995), is actively used according to some estimates by no more than a third of the country’s 10 million inhabitants;2 on the other hand, as recently as the 1989 Soviet census, roughly 75 per cent of the population of the Belarusian republic, including 80 per cent of ethnic Belarusians, indicated Belarusian as their ‘native language’ (Chislennost’ 1990, p. 205).