Until recently, not only students of the titular nationalities (ethnicities) learned their native language but also ethnic Russians and other nationalities in some ethnic republics of Russia had to learn titular state languages of those republics. The political campaign in Russia against the compulsory teaching of state languages of republics started two years ago and culminated in the adoption of the amendment to the Russian education law on 3 August 2018. 1 The law enacted some additional mechanisms to ensure the voluntary study of non-Russian languages. 2 The law adoption signified the escalation of the conflict around linguistic rights and the compulsory study of state language. The problem is that the official discources typically overshadow the discourses of individuals and non-govenrmental ogranization who have their own language attitudes and agendas, which distorts the depiction of the conflict. In this paper, we will study official and public discourses together, combining the 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' perspectives, in order to explore both the language policy and language ideologies, and, thus, to provide a multifaceted picture of the conflict. We use policy analysis and discourse analysis to study official documents, surveys, mass media, social media discussions.
Most of Russia’s national republics established titular and Russian as co-official state languages in their constitutions of the early 1990s. There is no consensus on the reasons and consequences of this act, whether it should be seen as a mere symbolic gesture, a measure to ensure a language revival, an instrument in political debate or an ethnic institution. From an institutional and comparative perspective, this study explores the constitutional systems of the Finno-Ugric republics and demonstrates that across the republics, the official status of the state languages was among the few references to ethnicity built into their constitutions. However, only in the case of language requirements for the top officials, its inclusion could be interpreted as an attempt at instrumentally using ethnicity for political ends. Otherwise, constitutional recognition of the state languages should be rather understood as an element of institutionalized ethnicity that remains a potential resource for political mobilization. This latter circumstance might clarify why federal authorities could see an obstacle for their Russian nation-building agenda in the official status of languages.
Les langues finno-ougriennes de Russie dans le système d'éducation : changement du cadre juridique et institutionnel et recul de l'accès à l'apprentissage des langues maternelles
The paper evaluates language policies of the ethnic republics of Russia titled after the ethnic groups speaking Finno-Ugric languages in order to understand why the policies had limited impact on their sociolinguistic situations. This is an empirical-analytical study based on quantitative research that investigates within the framework of policy analysis the link between policy outputs and outcomes in order to test the hypothesis that changes in behaviour and attitudes can be traced back to the patterns of languagemanagement. The study produces a systematized set of data on measures taken to create the conditions for language knowledge, use and attitudes in the republics and searches for correlations among variables. The sources of quantitative data include legal and other official documents, accessible official statistics and available sociological and sociolinguistic surveys. Such a policy evaluation contributes to the theoretical understanding of the limits of the revivalist project pursued as a “top-down” public policy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.