Language Power Hinges on State Power

Preservation of the Russian “language space” is contingent on the state of the economy, not on geopolitical shifts or military blocs. So says VITALY KOSTOMAROV, honorable President of the Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language.

Despite the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the common language space has been preserved across its territory: Most of the population still speaks Russian, using it as an instru­ment of interethnic communication. As is known, a similar single lan­guage space situation evolved follow­ing the breakup of other empires: the Roman, the British and the Spanish. How long will this Russian-language “aura” last?

I am afraid no one today could give an accurate answer to this question. This will depend on political and eco­nomic factors rather than on teachers or linguists. If Russia suffers the sad fate, it is promised sometimes — further pop­ulation decline, economic deterioration, and so forth − the same unenviable fate will also be in store for its language. If, however, Russia emerges as a strong and prosperous state, there will be no need to worry about the language. Af­ter all, interest in a language is predi­cated on the state of the national econ­omy. Religion, culture — all of this is of course very important but a viable lan­guage cannot rely on them alone. Rus­sian Lipovans in Romania have main­tained their language in absolute puri­ty for the past 150 years but even they are now gradually giving way.

Linguists can facilitate the spread of a language but they are unable to keep it “afloat” on their own. If, say, Turks spend five times as much to promote Turkish in Kirgizia than Russia does to promote Russian, there is no doubt which language will gain the upper hand. If Russia talks endlessly about supporting Russian in the Baltic states, but no Russian books or cassettes have reached the Russian Embassy in Tallinn in the past decade, this shows the real worth of these statements.

Why has English gained so much ground? Not thanks to its apparent “simplicity.” This is wrong if only be­cause there is no “standard” language that could be used as a yardstick to clas­sify all other languages as simple and dif­ficult. It is much easier for a Vietnamese to learn Chinese than English. Conquests hardly helped the British: You cannot teach a language with tanks. Economics, advanced science and technology, and a well developed education system — this is what predetermined the victory of English. Plus a colossal scale of migra­tion: British and Americans were not afraid of immigrants from other nations. As is known, we have a problem there.

What about the rumors about the demise or mutation of Russian — just like the once powerful Latin waned in its time?

As Russian political philosopher Georgy Plekhanov observed, historical parallels are an extremely dangerous thing. Even so, some general trends accompanying the breakup of multiethnic states are indeed well in evidence. The so-called mother-country language – the language variety used by citizens of this state as a means of interethnic communication — is always affected the most. This language suffers not only because newly independent states push to force it out — at least from the official sphere. This language is always affected by “carnivalizalion” —a kind of general euphoria resulting from sudden liberation. Today we are seeing this in full-blown form, just as we are seeing violations of the literary standards, penetration of for­eign words (in our case, predominate­ly English) and penetration of substan­dard speech.

Yet, I do not think that the devil is as black as he is painted. As it was point­ed out at a linguistic conference in St. Petersburg recently, the language has an in-built self-repair capacity and it will eventually cleanse itself of all things unnecessary.

But what will happen when a generation that did not have an opportunity to study Russian at school grows up? And, when will the situation that you’ve just described come about? I was told that we simply have no statistics on Russian language studies in the former Soviet republics: Apparently, the latest statistics are dated 1989.

Yes, we do have the information we need. Statistics may not be entirely ac­curate, but we have a general idea of what is going on.

But can we trust information pro­vided by CIS governments? They of­ten try to paint a rosy picture, saying that there are more Russian than, say, Ukrainian schools in Ukraine.

Or quite the contrary, they deliber­ately underreport the number of peo­ple who study Russian. Thus, at a re­cent conference, Russian Language: the European Dimension, I heard some speakers say that everything is falling apart. But when you start asking ques­tions, you find things are not so bad.

I have been teaching Russian abroad since 1952, and during this time I have not once heard people say: “Everything is okay with Russian.” All my life I’ve only heard that the number of students of Russian is constantly falling, that in­terest in it is dwindling, and so forth. But if that were really the case, we would not be talking Russian now. Meanwhile, it has long been observed that, say, Rus­sian language studies abroad are not marked by constant ups and downs: De­velopment has been sinusoidal rather. Sometimes this process can even be af­fected by some high-profile events: I re­member that when Gagarin went up into space, the number of Russian stu­dents increased several-fold. When 1 was in Egypt in 1956, during the Suez cri­sis, I could easily make myself under­stood speaking Russian in the street market: People there were grateful for our support. Of course, there were also reverse trends: In the wake of the Sovi­et invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 or the downing of the South Korean pas­senger jet in 1983, there was also talk to the effect that people were going off Russian. As a matter of fact, if we work out an average of this curve, we will see that it has been steadily going up. So long-term, there is no cause for concern.

Yet, following the decline in this country’s geopolitical influence, the number of Russian speakers should also presumably be shrinking?

Not necessarily. Statistics of course overstated the case somewhat: In coun­tries where Russian was a mandatory subject — virtually the whole of the former “socialist bloc” — we assumed that all secondary and post-secondary students who were nominally studying Russian − that is to say, virtually all stu­dents — were Russian-speakers, of vari­ous degrees of proficiency. Meanwhile, far from all of those people actually learned Russian. They could have at­tended Russian classes, but oftentimes to very little effect. Nothing could be done about that if they simply did not want to study the language.

At the same time statistics show that, say, in Poland, although the number of students of Russian there has declined approximately 10 times, the number of schoolchildren who took up Russian and successfully passed their exams exceeded the figures reported at the time when Russian was a mandatory subject.

In other words, quality is some­times more important than quantity.

That’s right. Generally speaking, when coercion is used in language stud­ies, the teacher pretends to be teaching a language and students pretend to be studying it while the drop-out rate is so high that there is simply nothing to talk about.

What do you know about the situ­ation in Ukraine?

The status of Russian there is proba­bly worse than in any other CIS repub­lic. It is ideological considerations that hold sway; moreover, as is known, the attitude to Russian in the west and east of Ukraine is different. I get the impres­sion that the Ukrainian government is not addressing the problem as it should. We are hearing assertions to the effect that Ukrainian is the purest language of the Eastern Slavs, its “stem” in fact, while Russian is only a “dead branch” that only survived thanks to injections of Old Slavonic. And other suchlike rev­elations — sometimes simply ludicrous. Bur I think that things will eventually straighten themselves out although the situation today is rather complex.

Communists and nationalists con­tend that Ukraine is being pushed to­ward this kind of policy by the Unit­ed States and the West as a whole. Did you see any evidence of that in your work?

It would probably be stretching the truth to say that there is none of that. Yet I do not see this as a disaster. Why should Americans or the British go out of their way to promote Russian? Each nation seeks to spread its own language − this is all but an instinct. Why has France adopted the Toubon law that limits the “Americanization” of French? This law may be naive, but the most im­portant thing is that the French realize that they alone can defend their lan­guage. And then there will be no one to blame for any problems that could arise. Ditto promotion of French abroad: France even has a separate ministry for French-speakers.

In many former Soviet republics, Russian is studied as a second or even third foreign language. First you learn English and, say, German, and only then do you take up Russian. Won’t it impair the quality of teach­ing and learning since a second or third language is harder to master?

Once again, I do not see this as a ca­lamity. We already saw a similar pattern in non-FSU countries. Finland, for in­stance, is again witnessing a rising in­terest in Russian. Why? Elementary: Say, all students in a class study English. Ev­eryone in the country can speak that lan­guage. But you want to be different, you want to carve out your own niche in business: You want to speak a language that no one else can speak. And so you take up Russian. Even if it is a third for­eign language: What is important is that you are really interested.

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