Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries - Hardcover

9781847690876: Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847690874 ISBN 13: 9781847690876

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2008

The dissolution of the USSR has created conditions for a unique sociolinguistic experiment, in which fourteen countries, previously united by the same language and political system, engaged in a nation-building process, creating new linguistic regimes. Two decades later, how did these countries fare in their struggle to initiate a shift from Russian to the titular languages? Which ones succeeded and which ones restored Russian as an official language? How did they go about articulating the rights of linguistic minorities? Did Russian give way to the new lingua franca, English? This collection offers answers to these and many other questions through detailed analyses of language and education policies and practices in post-Soviet countries.

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�ber die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dr. Aneta Pavlenko is an Associate Professor at the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. She has lectured widely in Europe, North America, and Japan, and published numerous scientific articles and book chapters on sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition. She is an author of Emotions and Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), co-author of Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition (with Scott Jarvis; Routledge, 2008), editor of Bilingual Minds (Multilingual Matters, 2006) and co-editor of Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2004).

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Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries

By Aneta Pavlenko

Multilingual Matters

Aneta Pavlenko: Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries: Language Revival, Language Removal, and Sociolinguistic Theory, 1, 
Markus Giger and Marian Sloboda: Language Management and Language Problems in Belarus: Education and Beyond, 41, 
Laada Bilaniuk and Svitlana Melnyk: A Tense and Shifting Balance: Bilingualism and Education in Ukraine, 66, 
Matthew H. Ciscel: Uneasy Compromise: Language and Education in Moldova, 99, 
Tatjana Bulajeva and Gabrielle Hogan-Brun: Language and Education Orientations in Lithuania: A Cross-Baltic Perspective Post-EU Accession, 122, 
Mart Rannut: Estonianization Efforts Post-Independence, 149, 
Juldyz Smagulova: Language Policies of Kazakhization and Their Influence on Language Attitudes and Use, 166, 
Abdykadyr Orusbaev, Arto Mustajoki and Ekaterina Protassova: Multilingualism, Russian Language and Education in Kyrgyzstan, 202, 
Mehrinisso Nagzibekova: Language and Education Policies in Tajikistan, 227,

CHAPTER 1

Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries: Language Revival, Language Removal, and Sociolinguistic Theory

Aneta Pavlenko

CITE Department, College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Introduction

In December of 2007, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine announced that starting in 2008 all foreign-language movies shown in the country will have to be translated into Ukrainian via dubbing, subtitles, or synchronous translation. There would be nothing attention-worthy about this announcement if the 'foreign language' category didn't also include Russsian, the native language of 30% of the population of Ukraine (www.ukrcensus.gov.ua), and one used and understood by the majority of the remaining 70%. The new law thus was not driven by linguistic needs, as it would be in the case of movies in French, Danish or Hindi. Nor was it driven by economic needs – the demand for Russian-language books and media continues to be high in Ukraine, and the measure may actually be detrimental to the already struggling film industry. In fact, it is the popularity of the Russian-language media – inconsistent with Ukraine's nationalizing agenda and political aspirations and alliances – that drives the new law whose purpose is to ensure that Ukrainian citizens live in a Ukrainian-language environment.

The announcement sparked a stormy debate in the media. Russian media have decried the law as yet another illiberal step taken by the Ukrainian government to deprive consumers of free choice and to impinge on the rights of Russian speakers. President Yushchenko contradicted this accusation stating that Ukrainian language policy conforms to all liberal European standards and that Russian is the language of another country that would not allow Ukrainians to identify themselves as Ukrainian.

This heated discussion is not unusual – rather, it is just another chapter in the ongoing saga of the Russian language in Ukraine (Bilaniuk & Melnyk, 2008). Nor are concerns about language status, policies and rights in the post-Soviet space limited to Ukraine. As will be shown in this collection, in the past two decades, post-Soviet countries as a whole have emerged as a contested linguistic space, where emotional exchanges over language-related issues are fodder for the daily news and where disagreements over language- and education-related decisions have led to demonstrations and at times even military conflicts and secession (cf. Ciscel, 2008).

For decades, and sometimes centuries, many inhabitants of what is now called post-Soviet countries have watched their native languages take second seat to Russian, the lingua franca of the Russian empire and then of the USSR. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 has created conditions for a unique sociolinguistic experiment, in which 14 countries previously united by the same language and political system could renegotiate this linguistic imbalance, strengthen the status of the titular languages and snatch the safety net from under the feet of monolingual Russian speakers, imposing new linguistic regimes in the process of building new nation-states.

A comparative analysis of language shift outcomes and of challenges faced by the 14 states in implementing new language laws and restructuring educational systems offers a unique contribution to contemporary theories of language policy, shift, minority rights and language education. It is all the more surprising then that the post-Soviet context as a whole has been largely ignored in the scholarship on language policy and bi- and multilingualism. Foundational work in this area was conducted by political scientists, most notably Laitin (1998), Kolsto (1995, 2002) and their teams, that rushed to the newly independent countries to document the change of linguistic regimes. Other cross-country investigations have been conducted by the interdisciplinary teams of Smith and associates (1998) and Landau and Kellner-Heinkele (2001), and, in the post-Soviet context, by the teams headed by Lebedeva (1995) and Savoskul (2001). The resulting monographs have documented the initial stages of the negotiation of national identities and laid the theoretical and methodological foundations for the future study of the area.

In the years that followed, linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists and education scholars have joined the fray to examine sociolinguistic and educational changes in single countries (e.g. Bilaniuk, 2005; Ciscel, 2007; Korth, 2005). This work offered nuanced, detailed and theoretically sophisticated sociolinguistic portrayals of the countries in question but without the integrative drive displayed by political scientists. Moreover, until recently, investigations conducted by Western and local scholars proceeded in parallel, rather than in collaboration.

At present, we are witnessing a transition to a new stage in the study of post-Soviet sociolinguistics, ushered in by pioneering efforts of three scholars intent on creating conditions for sustained and systematic collaboration between East and West. The efforts of Gabrielle Hogan-Brun have created conditions for such collaboration between Lithuanian, Estonian, and Latvian scholars and their international colleagues (Bulajeva & Hogan-Brun, 2008; Hogan-Brun, 2005a,b; Hogan-Brun et al., 2007). The efforts of Ekaterina Protassova and Arto Mustajoki have united scholars of Russian diaspora from around the world (Mustajoki & Protassova, 2004) and spearheaded a large-scale international investigation of multilingualism in Central Asia under the auspices of the INTAS project (Orusbaev et al., 2008; Smagulova, 2008).

In the same spirit, the first aim of the present collection is to support and expand the collaboration between scholars working inside and outside of the post-Soviet countries. Its second aim is to introduce language developments in the post-Soviet countries to the larger scholarly community. The third aim is to begin the process of integrating and theorizing the findings and to reflect on the challenges these findings present for sociolinguistic theory, in particular with regard to articulation of minority rights of speakers of a 'postcolonial' language.

Since the post-Soviet context is not particularly well known to the majority of readers, I will use this introduction to provide a general background against which...

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