Re: languages in Russia

From: Jaakko Raipala (raipala_at_pcu.helsinki.fi)
Date: 08/30/04 

Date: 30 Aug 2004 21:06:25 GMT

Xenia <tyusha@freemail.ru> wrote:

> Keith GOERINGER <verbivore@comcast.net> wrote
>> "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?

Perhaps it is, in regions where English has been forced on the people.
In Finnish schools Swedish is obligatory, even though practically
everyone in Finland speaks Finnish. Most young people consider the
teaching of Swedish a "remnant of the Swedish rule" (it isn't, but
that's the way it's percieved) and they make it an important point of
national pride to learn Swedish as badly as possible (while still
passing). The sentiment fades away when people grow older, since
Swedish is only "forced" on kids, but that's hardly the case in most
"non-Russian" parts of Russia, where even the adults are forced to use
Russian in everyday life.

Even the (by all means very insignificant) "forcing" of Swedish on
Finnish kids gets many of them to despise everything Swedish, so I'd
be *very* surprised if many of the ethnically non-Russian peoples in
Russia wouldn't consider speaking bad Russian a matter of great pride.

> 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?

The percentage of Swedish speakers has been steadily declining. I
think most of them will eventually assimilate, it'll just take a long
time. (They won't disappear completely, though, certain parts of the
country are dominantly Swedish and will remain so for the foreseeable
future.) Your analogy isn't that good, the Swedish speaking Finns are
culturally no different from the Finnish speaking Finns and there's no
ethnic barrier for switching languages.

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