Re: languages in Russia

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

Date: 30 Aug 2004 14:54:55 -0700

Jaakko Raipala wrote....
>Xenia wrote:
>> Keith GOERINGER 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?
>
> 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.

Hey, let's see what minorities in Russia speak bad Russia. For every
existing minority in European part - Tatars, Karelians, or Mari -
speak Russian as their first language, sometimes better than ethnic
Russians. Ditto about Siberian people whose numbers are very low.

The only region of RF where they have serious problems speaking good
Russian is North Caucasus. Once again, the Christian Ossetia and
Western repulblics (Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachevo-Cherkesia, Adygea)
are highly russophilic, so they speak Russian passably well. We have
three other highland Muslim regions left: Chechenya, Ingushetia, and
Dagestan.

As I pointed out in my original post, these highlanders are the only
"bad" Russian speakers around. Unlike many of their neighbours, they
are keen on preserving national identity, so perhaps the "pride"
argument is valid, but hardly "defiance/disdain" in the case of
russophilic Dagestan and Ingushetia. The particular feature of these
regions is that they live in remote mountain auls, often without tv or
papers, and have generally very little use of the Russian language.
(Russia is a federation, so they may use a vernacular tongue in courts
and other official bodies.)

One cannot help noticing that all three regions where they speak the
worst Russian are in the fold of Caucasian languages, unlike
neighbouring mountain regions where they speak Iranian (Ossetia) or
Turkic (Kabarda) tongues. Perhaps there is something in the Caucasian
phonetics and morphology that sets them aside from Indo-European ones,
so that native Caucasian speakers have so much trouble converting to
an Indo-European language.

Cheers!

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