Language policy and post-Soviet identities in Tatarstan

Abstract

This paper examines language policy and language use as identity technologies in the Republic of Tatarstan approximately 23 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Tatarstan is an autonomous republic politically situated within the Russian Federation, it has its own language policy which was implemented in 1992 and which declares Russian and Tatar as the official state languages having equal status in all spheres of language use. Additionally, as a result of an education policy implemented in 1997, Tatar language learning was made a compulsory subject in schools for all nationalities. This research examines how these policies have legitimized the Tatar identity alongside Russian from the top-down perspective, but how these legitimacies are not reflected from the bottom-up perspective [Graney 1999. “Education Reform in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan: Sovereignty Projects in Post-Soviet Russia.”Europe-Asia Studies51 (4): 611-632; Yemelianova 2000. “Shaimiev's ‘Khanate’ on the Volga and its Russian Subjects.”Asian Ethnicity1 (1)]. The focus of this research was to find out how effective these language and education policies as top-down identity technologies have been in post-Soviet Tatar society. An empirical research was carried out in Kazan in 2013 and revealed that asymmetrical bilingualism still prevails in contemporary Tatar society: Russian is used for everyday purposes by all nationalities, whereas Tatar is used as an in-group marker among Tatars within informal settings.