Putin’s Call for a State Policy on Russian Opens Door to More Attacks on Non-Russian Languages, Levontina Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 10 – The most disturbing thing about Vladimir Putin’s call for the elaboration of a state policy on the Russian language is that it opens the door to new attacks on the already embattled non-Russian languages of the Russian Federation, Irina Levontina, a senior scholar at the Moscow Institute for the Russian Language, says.

            That possibility, even likelihood is “truly frightening,” she says.  Recently, there have been “several steps in that direction,” including dropping the requirement in schools where these languages are widely used.  And in an interview with Anna Narinskaya of Novaya gazeta, Levontina offers two reasons for that judgment (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/08/10/86603-irina-levontina-iz-lyuboy-veschi-mozhno-sdelat-dubinu-i-koshmar).

            On the one hand, she points out, Putin’s proposal came out of nowhere as far as specialists on the Russian language are concerned. Levontina says she learned of it from television news. Normally, any such proposal would have been circulated through the expert community. This one wasn’t.

            And on the other, Russian doesn’t need defending, but the non-Russian languages do. “Russia is a very big language with an enormous literature in it,” she continues. It isn’t threatened with disappearance, and that is the most horrific thing which had happen to languages: literally every day several languages do disappear.”

            Russian isn’t even threated with becoming “an invalid” one used only in the home but not for scholarship. This is a big problem for Scandinavian languages, Levontina says, because scholars there write in English rather than publish in their own languages and then have them translated.  Russian scholars don’t do that.

            But that can’t be said of many of the non-Russian languages used by people in the Russian Federation. Not only have they lost their formerly obligatory status in regions where they are widely spoken, but it is unfortunately clear that this isn’t the last move against them that Moscow plans.

            This diminution in the status of these languages is “something extremely dangerous” because it strikes at the heart of individual and collective identity. Attacking these languages thus can generation “explosions.” 

            Creating a commission to consider the Russian language is unlikely to have either good or bad consequences for that language, Levontina suggests; but setting the precedent of having a government commission be called into existence and have it make rules for languages could easily become a disaster for non-Russian languages.