Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 8 – Moscow has come up with a new means to kill off non-Russian languages, Madina Khakuasheva says. The new textbooks for native language instruction are based on the assumption that they will be taught only two hours a week, a pattern that undercuts those educators and officials who seek to maintain more hours in these languages.
The senior researcher at the Kabardino-Balkar Institute for Research on the Humanities says this is yet another threat to the future of non-Russian languages in her republic and more generally and that it had the potential to kill off Circassian there over the course of a generation (zapravakbr.ru/index.php/30-uncategorised/1845-obuchenie-rodnogo-yazyka-v-shkolakh-kbr).
At present, she says, the number of hours of Kabardin and Balkar instruction in the republic depend heavily on the attitudes of school directors, with some supporting more hours in these languages and others less. To overcome this, officials from Moscow have adopted this new textbook-based approach to bring everyone into line.
Khakuasheva has written long and frequently about other threats to the non-Russian languages, but this is the first time that she has pointed to the way in which textbooks are being used. Few have focused on this method, and her words make it clear that this is a way for Moscow to destroy these languages without taking the kind of steps that would spark protests.
She calls for resistance but acknowledges that time is not on the side of these languages especially in urban areas where even non-Russian parents are asking their children study Russian “as a native language” so that they will be able to do well on the unified state examinations and get ahead.
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