Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 2 – Russia’s many
languages are constantly in kaleidoscopic motion, with some gaining, others
losing, and still others transformed. During the past week alone, some Duma
deputies tried to ban Russians’ use of foreign words, German enthusiasts sought
to reverse the demise of their language in Russia, and Karelian scholars moved
to overcome dialect divides.
LDPR Wants Russians
to Stop Using Foreign Loan Words
The language issue that attracted
the most attention this week was an unsuccessful effort by Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s
LDPR Party to have the Duma pass legislation that would ban the use of foreign
loan words by Russians and especially Russian officials and impose fines and
even confiscate the property of those who violated it.
This is only the latest of a series
of such efforts by the LDPR, and opponents succeeded because they pointed out
that the LDPR isn’t opposed to all foreign loan words just those which have
entered Russian in recent years from English and having to do with high tech or
public activities (diletant.ru/duels/20971631/).
Opponents also pointed out that the
LDPR needed to be more careful with its proposals: the party’s last proposal of
this kind, they noted, had a minimum of 20 grammatical errors. And they noted that if the party was really
interested in restoring Russian traditions, it would need to promote a
knowledge of French which was nearly universal among Russian elites before
1917.
But this is clearly an idea that
will not die even if it did not win approval this time around. Just as with Turks during and after the rule
of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, many Russians see the exclusion of foreign loan words
as a form of national self-assertion, especially against the increasing inroads
of English terminology.
Activists Want
Russian Germans to Speak German
German language enthusiasts are
upset by the loss of German-language use among Russian Germans and also by the
even more rapid decline in the use of the various dialects most Russian Germans
spoke until only a generation ago, and they are trying to do something about
both (nazaccent.ru/content/12228-trudnosti-pereezda.html).
To try to counter these trends, the International Union of German Culture has organized courses for ethnic German adults and children to encourage them to learn and use German. In addition, independent activists are organizing smaller groups who want to recover their Hesse or Pfaltz dialects.
Karelian
Scholars Want to End Dialect Divisions and Link to Finno-Ugric World.
Linguistic specialists in Petrozavodsk are
working to fuse the three dialects of Karelian into a single literary language
by drawing on the lexical resources of Estonian and Finnish, a project expected
to take ten to fifteen years but one that gives its promoters hope that
Karelian, which is now spoken by about 35,000 people, will survive along with
its speakers.
In an interview to “Vedomosti
Karelii,” Irma Mullonen, director of the Institute of Language, Literature, and
History of the Karelian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said
experts have concluded that the Karelians lack the resources to support three
dialects (vedkar.ru/obshhestvo/edinyj-karelskij-yazyk-mozhet-poyavitsya-cherez-10-15-let/).
Consequently,
they have decided to form a common literary language which will combine
elements of Karelian, Livve and Lude dialects into a single literary language
and to modernize its lexical structure by drawing on words used in Estonian and
Finnish, two other Finno-Ugric languages.
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