Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 24 – Ramzan Kadyrov has demanded that every Chechen know how to speak Chechen well and said that he will dismiss any official who can’t do so; and his government constantly stages pompous celebrations of the Chechen language at which officials dress in national dress and use Chechen words.
But teachers in the republic and experts there and elsewhere say that none of this is preventing the rapid disappearance of Chechen as the language of the population and its replacement by Russian (kavkazr.com/a/mezhdu-ukazami-i-realjnostjyu-kak-ischezaet-chechenskiy-yazyk/33684085.html).
Ever fewer children in kindergartens and schools in the republic speak Chechen, teachers there say; and experts suggest that this is not just because Russian is more widely used by their parents than is Chechen but because of a conscious policy of Russianization of the republic’s population, something that no celebrations suggesting otherwise can do anything to stop.
Except for the very oldest Chechens, many Chechen adults can’t speak their national language well, according to informal surveys conducted on the streets of Grozny; and therefore the transmission of the language from one generation to another has been interrupted (facebook.com/reel/1549040205640316 and facebook.com/reel/223671560187621).
Mikail Eldiyev, a philologist who lives in Norway, says that in view the decline of the use of Chechen reflects a conscious Moscow policy which seeks to convince Chechens and other non-Russians that their languages are useless and that Russian alone is the language they need to live and work in if they are to have a better future.
At the same time, he says that he doesn’t consider the situation to be hopeless. The republic still has laws on the book supporting Chechen to which people there can appeal, and the situation among Chechens in the diaspora, while not without problems, is far better than in their homeland.
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