Fwd: Петиция за признание русского языка

[John Dunn]

In terms of EU practices and procedures the Russian speakers resident in the EU (not all are EU citizens) are not voiceless: they have the same rights as Catalan speakers in Spain, Sardinian speakers in Italy and Welsh speakers in the UK, or, if you consider Russian to be an immigrant, rather than a regional or minority language, the same rights as Urdu speakers in the UK and Kabyle speakers in France.   Given enough good will from enough countries there may be ways of giving Russian some form of recognition, but from an EU point of view it is difficult to see why Russian should be treated differently from other regional, minority or immigrant languages by being given official status.  Incidentally, there is no automatic link between official status in a member country and official status within the EU: Irish had to wait 34 years (until 2007) to become an official language of the EU, while Letzebuergesch and Turkish (official languages of Luxembourg and Cyprus respectively) !
 remain out in the cold.   

John Dunn.

________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of anne marie devlin [anne_mariedevlin at HOTMAIL.COM]
Sent: 21 May 2012 15:12
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Fwd: Петиция за признание русского языка

As stated in the original posting, the main reason for this is the 7 million or so native-speakers of Russian who are EU citizens.  Many of these citizens have been denied language parity in their own countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lituania being the most obvious countries). Although the reason for the rejection of Russian as an official language in these countries is very understandable, it does result in a significant percentage of the population essentially being rendered voiceless.  With that in mind, there may be a valid case for the EU to accept this minority language as an official one; however this would undoubtably be a source of great conflict between the member states and the EU.
AM

> Date: Mon, 21 May 2012 13:51:36 +0100
> From: John.Dunn at GLASGOW.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: [SEE------------------------------------------------------------------------- Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription options, and more. Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at: http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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