Multilingualism in post-Soviet countries

Aneta Pavlenko

Temple University, USA

Workshop

Between the Restoration of National Sovereignty and the Respect for Minority Rights: Testing the Concept of Post-Colonialism in Latvia. Adrey, Jean-Bernard
Bilingual communication in Tallinn and Ida-Virumaa: regional patterns Anastassia Zabrodskaja
Kazakhstan: Transformation of language ideology Smagulova, Juldyz
Micro-Compromise and Macro-Deadlock: ?The (im)balance of multilingualism in Moldova Matthew H Ciscel
Multilingualism in Ukraine: Challenges and perspectives for minority languages Svitlana Melnyk
Multilingualism in Uzbekistan Hasanova, Dilia

Multilingualism in post-Soviet countries

What happens when an official language spoken by the majority of the country’s population loses its status and becomes overnight a language of an ethnic minority? And what if the titular language of the same country is spoken by less than a half of the country's population? Can language laws and policies affect linguistic competencies of the population? Can they shape new national and linguistic affiliations and allegiances? How can everyone's rights be respected and maintained within the newly emerging multilingual constellations? The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union created a unique “controlled experiment” enabling scholars to observe how this situation might unfold simultaneously in fourteen countries previously united by the same political system and now embarking on their own nation-building trajectories.

The present workshop will examine the complex interrelationship between language

laws and policies (macro) and language practices (micro) in six post-Soviet countries. These countries will be subdivided into three pairs where contributors will explore similarities and differences between geographic neighbors: Ukraine (Melnyk)/Moldova (Ciscel); Latvia (Adrey)/Estonia (Verschik & Zabrodskaja); and Kazakhstan (Smagulova)/ Uzbekistan (Hasanova).

The workshop will take place in a roundtable format divided into two 90 minute parts. Each part will focus on a set of questions posited by the organizer. Each contributor will take up to 10 minutes to address the questions from their own theoretical and methodological perspective and in the context of their country (6 x 10 min = 60 min). Their arguments will be followed by a general discussion with the audience (30 minutes) and at the end, with the concluding remarks from the organizer. Throughout, audience members will have an opportunity to ask questions and to participate in the discussion.

1st part. State language(s): Language laws and linguistic practices. What is the state language of your country? How do existing language, citizenship, and education laws

regulate the knowledge and use of this language (e.g., via citizenship language testing etc.)? What were the levels of linguistic competence in this language pre-1991? How have they changed in the past two decades? Where do you see the greatest effects of current language laws and policies? Where do you see the areas of tension and compromise?

2nd part. Minority languages: Language laws and linguistic practices. What are the current laws iand policies in your country with regard to minority languages? What are the key minority languages in the country? How do current laws and policies aid in the maintenance and transmission of these languages? What are the challenges currently faced by the country in balancing the needs of the titular and minority populations? What are the roles played by outside forces, such as Russia and the European Union, in these developments? Do you think Western approaches to linguistic minority rights can be applied wholesale to post-Soviet countries? If not, what adaptations might be needed to current theories of minority rights? What challenges are presented to these theories by existence of majoritized minority languages, such as Russian, in post-Soviet countries?

At the SS16 in Limerick the organizer of the current workshop co-chaired a workshop on Russian in diaspora in Near and Far Abroad that sparked a lot of follow-up discussion and

eventually led to the creation of an AILA-sponsored research network on multilingualism in post-Soviet countries. The proposed workshop is the first official meeting of the members of this network. The workshop has three interrelated aims. Its primary aim is to bring together post-Soviet scholars from a variety of countries to examine the complex interrelationship between language policies and practices in the context of nation-building in post-Soviet countries. The second and related aim is to discuss the challenges offered to traditional theories of linguistic minority rights by the existence of majoritized minority populations, such as Russians in Kazakhstan or Latvia, where in 1991 Russian was spoken by the larger segment of the country's population than the titular language. The third aim is to compare, discuss and begin developing new approaches toward linguistic minority rights that will allow for equitable and consistent treatment of language minority issues across the post- Soviet space.

Key references:

Adrey, J.-B. (2005) Minority language rights before and after the 2004 EU enlargement: The Copenhagen criteria in the Baltic states. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 26, 453-468.

Bilaniuk, L. (2005) Contested tongues: Language politics and cultural correction in Ukraine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Ciscel, M. (2007) The language of the Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and identity in an ex-Soviet republic. Lexington Publishers.

Laitin, D. (1998) Identity in formation: The Russian-speaking populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Landau, J., & Kellner-Heinkele, B. (2001) Politics of language in the ex-Soviet Muslim states. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

May, S. (2001) Language and minority rights: Ethnicity, nationalism, and the politics of language. Longman.

Ozolins, Uldis (2003) The Impact of European Accession on Language Policy in the Baltic States. Language Policy 2, 217-238.

Pavlenko, Aneta (2006) Russian as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 26, 78–99.