Re: languages in Russia

From: Jaakko Raipala (raipala_at_pcu.helsinki.fi)
Date: 08/29/04 

Date: 29 Aug 2004 21:43:11 GMT

Wiktor S. <wswiktor@poczta.fmv> wrote:

> Russian is the official language of Russia, but what languages do people
> actually speak? Or the country is monolingual?

The Russian Empire, the infamous "prison of nations", was the most
diverse country that has existed in modern times, with only half of
the people being ethnic Russians and the rest belonging to a wild
variety of peoples, from Finns to Eskimos, from Jews to Muslims, from
Germans to Koreans and so on. The Empire, of course, made it an
important policy to "russify" the various minorities, frequently
banning whole languages, the Latin alphabet, expressions of different
cultures and so on, with varying levels of success (sometimes
backfiring badly and creating recessionism in areas that previously
weren't too interested in independence; Finland is a perfect example).

The communist era made things much worse. For the communists, culture
itself was of course of no value if it didn't somehow serve the
state's interests. The existence of different languages and dialects
was an inefficient complication. The new Soviet man wasn't supposed to
confess to different ethnicities, only to the official ideology. The
leaders were paranoid madmen like Stalin who found the existence of
ethnic minorities with ties to neighbouring countries (like Finnic
peoples and Germans - spies! collabolators!) impossibly threatening.

Russification and ethnic cleansing were started on an entirely
different scale. Many small cultures were easily entirely wiped out
with divide-and-conquer tactics, by spreading the people all over the
country with no possibility of interacting with members of their own
ethnic group, so they had no choice but to assimilate. (You mentioned
that many of the languages of Russia are spoken by mere hundreds of
people. It's even worse than that: often the only speakers of those
languages are very old, maybe born before WWII, since the young have
had no chance to learn the language. These languages really are
dying.) Non-Russians got more easily killed, the famous famines
tended to mysteriously target non-Russian ethnicities and so on.

Today, IIRC about 80 % of the population is ethnically Russian and
most of the other 20 % speak Russian, with the indigenous peoples
usually badly overrun even in their own traditional areas by recent
Russian colonists. These aren't the language statistics, though (I
don't remember anything about them): many of the ethnically
non-Russian people can only speak Russian, since that has been the
language of goverment, schools and urban culture (and the Russian
majority isn't exactly keen on giving up their privileges, even if
they realize that they were acquired through a brutal totalitarian
system that they themselves hated).

Russia is still very heterogeneous; the linguistical homogeneity that
certain (very delusional) posters advertised in this thread is
artificial and only recently created. If the Russians were to suddenly
become enlightened on minority issues, much diversity could get revived.

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