<div dir="ltr"><h1 class="">NEW - The turmoil in the Ukraine: It’s about the language, stupid!</h1>
<p class="">Apr 22, 2014 <br>By John Freivalds<br>
</p>
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<p>
300 million in 1990.</p>
<p>
150 million in 2025.</p>
<p>
100 million in 2035.</p>
<p>
The figures indicate the number of Russian speakers in the world and
show that, in a mere 45 years, their numbers will have declined by a
third. It is this huge decline, plus action by the Ukrainian Parliament
that was the catalyst, and not the only cause, for Russian President
Vladimir Putin invading Crimea.</p>
<p>
The action: the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkovna Rad) abolished the 2012
law “On State Language Policy” the day after it dismissed President
Victor Yanukovich. The law allowed the country’s regions like Crimea to
use more than one official language, in addition to Ukrainian, where
over 10 percent of the local population speaks another language. Ukraine
has 27 regions and several in eastern Ukraine, thus, it adopted Russian
as an official second language. Two western regions introduced Romanian
and Hungarian as official languages. No more.</p>
<p>
Polish Foreign Minister Radolsaw Sikrski saw this as a big mistake:
“The new Ukrainian government should signal ever so eloquently to the
ethnic minorities in Ukraine that they are welcome in Ukraine, that they
are going to be part of the new Ukraine. Also, Ukraine is a member of
the Council of Europe, with its laws on protecting minorities. Attacks
on the use of other languages in Ukraine are a brutal violation of
ethnic minority rights.”</p>
<p>
The Russian foreign minister also weighed in on the “infringing of the
right to speak [people’s] native languages, discrimination based on
ethnicity or country of origin, attacks and acts of vandalism performed
on monuments of historical and cultural heritage such as Ukraine’s
Soviet and the Imperial Russian past have been torn down all over the
country in the past few days.”</p>
<p>
Geopolitical considerations, such as Russia having its naval base in
Crimea and the shrinking in size after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
were all too much for Putin to take. The venerable mother tongue that
he grew up with was being ‘dissed’ as a ‘sobichi yazik,’ a dog’s
language, as the Russians call other languages of the former Soviet
Union.</p>
<p>
What Ukraine did was dramatic, but all the former Soviet republics have
encouraged their native languages at the expense of Russian, which the
Soviet Russians did to them. Claire Nutall, writing in Russia Beyond the
Headlines in an article entitled “In Central Asia Russian Wave Ebbs
Away” notes Kazakhstan as an example: “Although the Russian language is
deemed equal to Kazak under the constitution, legislation and programs
in Kazakhstan since 2001 are increasing the use of the Kazak language as
the main language of government. This proves to be an obstacle to
access in education and enrollment in the civil service for a large part
of the Russian minority.”</p>
<p>
The same is true in Latvia, where I was born and still own land. But to
protect itself, Latvia joined NATO and the European Union and adopted
the euro - all to send a warning to Russia. I used to be considered a
fringe nationalist by many people, but after what happened in Ukraine, I
am mainstream again.</p>
<p>
Putin is frightened by what he sees happening to the Russian language. According to <a href="http://www.baltictimes.com/goto/www.rusian-moscow/">www.Russian-Moscow</a>,
"by 2025 Russian will be spoken by as many people as in the beginning
of the 20th century. According to forecasts, within 10 years Russian
should be overtaken by French, Hindi, Arabic and, within 15 years, by
Portuguese.”</p>
<p>
<strong>OK Ukraine</strong></p>
<p>
The Web site Kwintessential notes: “One of the remarkable aspects of
the Ukrainian language is the fact that it exists at all in the modern
world. It has been banned and discouraged by many non-Ukrainian regimes
but has always maintained its existence somehow, even by informal
methods of keeping the tongue alive such as in songs, folklore, and Ivan
Kotlyarwsky’s “Eheyida,” which was the first book to be published in
Ukrainian and has become a classic.</p>
<p>
That the Russians would now claim Ukrainians were being unfair to
Russian-speakers is ludicrous considering what was done in the Stalin
era. Quoting from Wikipedia: “Major repression started in 1929-30 when a
large group of Ukrainian intelligentsia was arrested and executed...
Ideologues warned of over-glorifying Ukraine’s Cossack past and
supported the closing of all Ukrainian cultural institutions and
literary publications. The systematic assault upon Ukrainian identity
and education combined with the effects of an artificial famine upon the
peasantry - the backbone of the nation - dealt the Ukrainian language
and identity a crippling blow from which it would not completely
recover.”</p>
<p>
The Ukrainian language is a member of the east Slave subgroup of Slavic
languages and the official language of the Ukraine. According to
Wikipedia, lexically the closest to Ukrainian is Belarusian (84 percent
common vocabulary), followed by Polish (70 percent), Serbo-Croatian (68
percent), Slovak (66 percent), and Russian (62 percent).</p>
<p>
The Russians maintain that it is merely a dialect of Russiaas it
retains a degree of mutual intelligibility. The Spanish government says
the same thing about Catalan. The Ukrainian language has six vowels and
is written in a version of Cyrillic; the diction of the Ukrainian
language has 135,000 entries.</p>
<p>
In a poll done in 2009, of 1,000 Ukrainians, 52 percent said they use
Russian as a chief means of communication; 41 percent said they use
Ukrainian; 7 percent said they use a mixture of both.</p>
<p>
<strong>More language intervention</strong></p>
<p>
The developments in the Ukraine are symptomatic of the decline of the
Russian language. The decline is being debated at the highest levels of
the Russian government. According to themoscownews, Benjamin Kagarov,
deputy minister of education and science, said in a December 2013
conference that Russian would totally disappear beyond Russia’s borders
within 50 years under competition from more aggressively mobile tongues
such as English. The Modern Language Association in the U.S.reports that
Russian and Latin are vying to be the least major languages studied in
college; Spanish, French, and German are at the top.</p>
<p>
The Russian government then allocated $50 million to set up language
centers around the world, a la Alliance Francaise, but why study Russian
at this juncture? Timur Atnahdev, a lecturer at the Russian
Presidential Academy of Public Administration and Economics in Moscow,
writing in Global Brief, is pretty pessimistic about the future of
Russian and doesn’t believe any intervention by Putin in Ukraine, or any
other former Soviet state, can help reverse the tide. In a stilted
English translation he wrote: "The major global message and legacy in
the Russian language was the classic Russian literature of Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky, and Checkov... The Russian heritage does not have a
paradigmatic, political, or normative dimension in the idiom, of say,
Greek philosophy or Roman law. It is simply part of European and
Christian self-reflection. And self-refection does not necessarily make
for geopolitical import or impact. In other words, people won’t be
lining up to read Russian classics in their original language.</p>
<p>
This is an opinion piece by John Freivalds</p><p><a href="http://www.baltictimes.com/news/articles/34749/#.U1bDRVeVm-c">http://www.baltictimes.com/news/articles/34749/#.U1bDRVeVm-c</a><br></p><p><br></p><br clear="all">
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