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Aug 02, 2018 </figcaption>
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Minority Languages Under Siege in Russia and Crimea </h2>
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<div class="gmail-intro"><p style="text-align:justify"><strong>On 19 June 2018, the Russian government approved a law restricting the</strong> <strong>right
to receive pre-school, primary and basic secondary education in a
child’s native language. This will severely infringe upon the eight
Russian federal districts’ right to self-determination as well as on the
culture and linguistic identity of many of its minorities. The Crimean
Tatars, who live in the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally
occupies since 2014, fear that this legal amendment will seriously
curtail the possibility to provide native language classes and thereby
contribute to eradicating their culture. </strong></p></div>
<p style="text-align:justify"> </p>
<p style="text-align:justify">In the Russian Federation, Russian is
the only official state language, despite the fact that 111 different
languages are spoken within the country’s present-day territory. 35 of
those languages are officially recognised as national languages of
Russia. According to UNESCO’s Red Book of Endangered Languages, only
three of these (Tatar from Tatarstan, Yakut, Tuvinian) are not
endangered. The remaining ones are either considered ‘on the verge of
extinction’ or ‘threatened’. Among these endangered languages is the
Turkic language Crimean Tatar (<em>Qırımtatar tili</em>), as Crimea is
currently occupied by Russia and its policies have a severe impact there
as well. Currently the Crimean Tatar language is classified as
‘developing’ on the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale
(EGIDS), meaning that ‘the language is in vigorous use, with
standardisation and literature being sustained through a widespread
system of institutionally supported education’. </p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Crimean Tatars arrived in Crimea in the
13th century with the Mongol Golden Horde and settled in a region where
previously Crimean Greek was spoken. Nowadays, according to estimations,
there are approximately 480,000 speakers of Crimean Tatar. In terms of
linguistic classification one can think of it in the ‘language
tree-model’ as having developed from Proto-Turkic, then Common Turkic,
Kipchak and finally Kipchak-Cuman, also known as Ponto-Caspian. It is
therefore in the same linguistic family as the Kumyk language and not
directly related to Turkish, which has developed from Oghuz. However,
due to geographic proximity, Crimean Tatar has been influenced
substantially by modern Turkish. Also, it is worth mentioning that it
should not be confused with Tatar, which also is a Kipchak language and
therefore closer to Crimean Tatar than to Turkish, but spoken in
Tatarstan, in the Russian Federation.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Historically, the homeland of the
Crimean Tatars has been the Crimean Peninsula. For most of the 20th
century it was a Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, part of
the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union it became part of
Ukraine. Following the illegal occupation and annexation by Russia and a
contested referendum in 2014, Moscow declared Crimea part of the
Russian Federation – an act declared illegal and roundly condemned by
the international community. Crimean Tatars make up for more than 10
percent of the peninsula’s population. Most of them still carry with
them the memory of the Soviet-era victimisation of their family members
and their forced deportations in 1944, mostly to Siberia, which happened
during Stalin’s regime.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Given Crimea’s illegal annexation and
de-facto control by Russia, for now, the future of the Crimean Tatar
language primarily hinges on Moscow’s official linguistic policy. This
explains the outcry by the Crimean Tatar community when, in April 2018, a
bill amending the Russian federal law was submitted to the Duma, which
approved it on 19 June. This bill will make significant changes to
children’s right to receive pre-school, primary and basic secondary
education in their native language. Before its passing, federations
within Russia with a second or third official language had to allocate a
certain number of hours per week to teach these languages at school.
With this change in legislation, policy-makers aim to make minority
language classes optional and significantly limit their provision in the
first place. A number of measures are likely to be introduced to
discourage the attendance of minority language classes. For instance,
they can now only be attended with prior written permission of the
respective student’s parents and the number of hours allocated to mother
tongue education has been reduced from five to six hours per week to
only two hours, of which one hour is dedicated to language and one to
literature of the respective minority language. In addition, the
newly-passed bill demands that the Russian language from now on be
equally considered as a native language, and therefore also be an option
to choose from - in addition to the regular Russian classes that are
already being provided.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">The main argument behind this bill is
that children that live in these regions should not be ‘forced’ to learn
languages that are not their mother tongues. However, this resolution
contradicts Russia’s Language Law (1991) and Education Law (1992), which
recognises the right for education in people’s native languages and
delegates authority on these matters to the federations. Since then, the
eight federal districts established compulsory teaching of their own
regions’ native languages as a school subject for all students
irrespective of their ethnicity, that is, including students whose first
language is Russian. Thus, the federations are legal state entities
that have the right to self-determination within the legal framework of
the Russian Federation. Preserving the native languages on the ground by
school education, was, until recently, part of the federal districts’
competencies.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Not only can the Kremlin’s interference
in this policy area be seen as an intrusion into an area previously
delegated to the federal districts, but also, now that parents have to
give a written permission for their children to take part in mother
tongue education classes, they are also targets of systematic
bureaucratic harassment. What makes this new law even more problematic
is that, as mentioned, Russian language will from now on be considered
as a native language among those to choose from. Given the fact that
Russia’s final high school exam has to be taken in Russian, and
generally speaking, a good command of Russian is a prerequisite for
socio-economic ascension in most career paths, parents are likely to be
expected to opt for Russian native language classes in spite of their
linguistic minority background. Thus, with the new law, learning one’s
native language at school can be done only to the detriment of a better
command of Russian, which, in effect, discourages speakers of minority
languages from learning their native languages at school.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">There has been resistance against this
new legal amendment among the Russian population, especially from the
linguistic minorities within the Federation such as the
Kabardino-Cherkess in Kabardino-Nalkaria, the Ossetians in North Ossetia
and the Kumyk and Avar in Dagestan, but also from the Crimean Tatars in
Crimea. Already, the number of native speakers of these linguistic
minorities has been decreasing in recent years, even during the time
when native language education was compulsory. An internet <a href="https://www.change.org/p/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82-%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B9-%D1%84%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B8-%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80-%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87-%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD-%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%82-%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%83-%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B2-%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BD%D1%8B%D1%85-%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2">petition</a> against this new law has been set up and about fifty thousand signatures have been collected so far.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Education is one of the key tools of
linguistic policy-making in order to either encourage or discourage the
acquisition and consequently the preservation of children’s native
languages. This legislative amendment put forward by the Russian
government will certainly cause the latter, provoking a further decrease
in the number of speakers of these languages. The UNPO hopes that
decision-makers in the Duma will remember the distinction made in the
Russian language between pусский (russkij) and pоссийский (rossijskij),
in a further reading of this amendment. The former term refers to the
Russian ethnicity, while the latter designates all citizens of the
Russian Federation. If one were to believe the Russian government’s
discourse, after 2014, Crimean Tatars have become Russian subjects, or
pоссийский, which in turn means that they should not their right to
preserve their Crimean Tatar identity, culture, religion and, crucially,
their language, taken away from them.</p></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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