Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 20 – Languages
which have relatively small numbers of speakers are threatened around the world
by the forces of globalization, but in Russia, this threat is greater than many
other places because of what one Chuvash commentator calls that country’s
“homegrown globalism” – Russification.
Ersubay Yangarov, the Chuvash
correspondent for Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir Service, interviewed a group of
Chuvash philologists, journalists, and teachers about the current state and
future prospects of the Chuvash language in the Chuvash Republic and in the
Russian Federation as a whole (idelreal.org/a/28317621.html).
While some expressed some optimism
about the future, most are alarmed by state of Chuvash now. In the words of one
journalist, “Russification is proceeding on the sly. Now, we struggle with
cosmopolitan globalism but completely forget about our domestic homegrown form
– Russification.”
In the Chuvash Republic, Chuvash
form 68 percent of the population, but only 274 primary schools use Chuvash and
then only as a secondary language. “There is not a single school [now] in the
republic which uses Chuvash for all subjects,” Yangarov points out. His
interlocutors say the situation is the same for other republics and even worse
for diasporas.
Unlike even in Soviet times, now, “Chuvash
has ceased to be studies in teacher training schools and technicums even though
in them study primarily children from Chuvash villages,” and in urban kindergartens
and schools no Chuvash classes are held at all, meaning that the language is
increasingly being frozen out of the growing urban population.
One of the clearest indications of
that is that in classes five through nine, only one hour a week is devoted to
the study of the Chuvash language, even though officials then count such
schools as dual language institutions. And
in the republic’s university, the Chuvash philology faculty has been closed. As
a result, there won’t be new teachers of Chuvash.
Chuvash media are also in trouble,
the participants in this discussion say.
On the one hand, people are turning away from the print media to the
Internet. And on the other, in the words of one, “that relative ‘freedom’” in
regional media outlets is “even lower than in the USSR,” given that officials
see any interesting stories as potential attacks on themselves.
And that is a problem because in
Chuvashia as in most non-Russian areas, there are no private print media in the
national language. That means the government controls them, and all involved
know what the limits are as far as covering local stories that people are
interested in but that officials don’t like.
One longtime Chuvash journalist adds
that “the picture is the same for all national newspaper – in Tatarstan, in
Bashkortostan and in Mari El,” for example. And the many non-Russians who live
beyond the borders of their titular republics face an even more dire situation
relative to their native languages in the schools and in media.
The participants make two final
observations which are worthy of note. First, while many Chuvash parents choose
to push their children into a Russian-language environment in the hope that
this will help them get ahead, non-Russians from elsewhere who come to
Chuvashia pick up the native language even more rapidly and completely than
many Chuvash children.
And second, they say, the situation
with regard to non-Russian schools is much worse now under Putin than it was in
Soviet times. There were some 1200
Chuvash schools beyond the borders of the Chuvash ASSR before 1991; now there
are only 300 and none of them uses Chuvash for all subjects.
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