Re: languages in Russia

From: Xenia (tyusha_at_freemail.ru)
Date: 08/30/04 

Date: 30 Aug 2004 02:12:13 -0700

Keith GOERINGER <verbivore@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<verbivore-14BA31.19392929082004@comcast.dca.giganews.com>...
> In article <7df91bca.0408290850.6e3c824c@posting.google.com>,
> tyusha@freemail.ru (Xenia) wrote:
>
> > Wiktor S. wrote...
> > > Russian is the official language of Russia, but what languages do people
> > > actually speak? Or the country is monolingual?
> >
> > Officially the country is polylingual but the Russian is universally
> > comprehended.
>
> "Comprehended" maybe, but definitely not equally well everywhere, as
> your comment on Dagestan points out. It seems that in many parts of
> Russia where Russian is not the native tongue of the main populace,
> speaking bad Russian is something of a sign of defiance/disdain/national
> pride (as it was in many if not most non-Slavic SSRs in Soviet days).

Just like foreigners speaking bad English deliberately demonstrate
their defiance/disdain/national pride?... Hey, are you serious?

> Russian is also used as lingua franca elsewhere in the
> > former USSR. It is the language of everyday speech in Belarus,
> > Kazakhstan and most of Ukraine.
>
> In Belarus it may well remain that way for a while, given the overall
> good relations between Russia and Belarus. But I would imagine that by
> the time the current pre-teens are in their 30's or so in Kazakhstan and
> the other Stans, and Ukraine, Russia will no longer be a lingua franca.

So you imagine that the Christian Russian population of Kazakhstan or
Kirgizia (where Russian is the official language, by the way) will
switch over to the meagre tongues of turkish nomads? Why the Swedish
population of Finland never have? Why is the French persisting as
lingua franca all over North Africa?

This summer I was travelling across Eastern Ukraine to Crimea and I
*never* heard Ukrainian speech spoken, by the younger generations
least of all. Traditional Ukrainian is the dialect of peasants living
west of Kiev. New Ukrainian is the tasteless hopscotch of Russian,
Ukrainian and (most of all) Polish words employed by the ruling elite
in Lvov since the 19th century, now also in Kiev.

> > > Are there significant differences between Russian spoken in Moscow and,
> > > say,
> > > Archangelsk?
> >
> > No difference at all. The particular feature of the Russian language
> > is that it has virtually no dialects. On the huge territories,
> > rivalling in size the whole of Europe, people have been speaking the
> > same language, except certain differences in pronunciation of several
> > letters.
>
> Um, that's pretty much what a dialect is all about. I think that saying
> Russian has *virtually* no dialects is misleading. There are dialects
> with different types of akanie; there are dialects that in which okanie
> is the norm; some dialects have a distinct reflex of <jat'> (as opposed

Update your library. The distinction in the pronunciation of that
single letter may have persisted in the 19th century, as I pointed out
above. But it is not there anymore, except in the most distant
villages where they have no papers and television.

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