Paul Goble
Staunton,
April 3 – Despite Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s tilt away from Moscow and even his
own use of his country’s national language on occasion, the situation of the
Belarusian language is dire and is likely going to deteriorate further because
of the failure of Mensk to live up to its own laws, according to the
Frantsishak Skaryna Belarusian Language Society.
The
Belarusian-language newspaper “Novy chas” reports that the organization has concluded
that the national language, despite that country’s constitutional requirements,
is being driven out not simply because of the greater availability of
Russian-language materials but also because of state policies (novychas.info/hramadstva/tbm_padrychtavala_spis_arhumie/,
available in Russian at http://www.belaruspartisan.org/life/300424/).
Of
particular concern, the language society says, is the fact that at the present
time ever fewer students are studying in Belarusian-language schools. In the
2013/2014 academic year, only 15.5 percent of all students were in such
schools, and in the republic capital for that year, only 2.1 percent, a pattern
it described as “impermissible.”
The
number of Belarusian-language schools continues to fall, the society said, and
no new ones are being opened. Moreover, in some of the country’s higher
educational institutions, the only subject taught in Belarusian is Belarusian language,
a situation which it shares with all foreign languages except Russian and which
has been made worse by a two-thirds cutback in the number of hours those
enrolled in such courses attend.
The
Belarusian government itself says that only ten percent of all books published
in Belarus are issued in the national language, and it acknowledges that the
regime ignores the constitutional requirement that all laws and decrees be
issued in Belarusian regardless of whether they are issued in other languages
first.
Last
year, the Belarusian council of ministers adopted 1297 decrees, but only 170
(some 13 percent) were ever issued in Belarusian. Also during that year, the
country’s House of Representatives adopted only two laws which were made
available in Belarusian, and the National Bank issued only nine in the national
language.
The
government makes the situation worse, the language society says, by allowing
fact that it allows the two main newspapers in Mensk, “Minsky kuryev” and “Vecherny
Minsk,” to come out only in Russian and by failing to open a Belarusian
television channel, arrangemetns that directly contradict the existing
constitution and the 2005 referendum.
In
short, the situation with regard to the national language in Belarus is more
like the situation of the national languages of the non-Russian republics
within the Russian Federation than it is with that in the other countries which
emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union a generation ago.
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