The percentage of schoolchildren in the Russian Federation studying in native tongues other than Russian halved between 2016 and 2023. Instruction in thirty-eight languages ceased altogether. Experts argue that this situation was caused by a whole slew of problems, including a downturn in interest in native languages, a decrease in the number of lessons taught in them, a shortage of teachers, and an estrangement from foreign partners due to sanctions.
According to the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, there are 155 living languages in the Russian Federation, thirty-seven of which have the status of official languages in the republics, meaning that they should be used in those regions on an equal footing with Russian. In Russia’s comprehensive education system, native languages are studied in three forms: as separate subjects, as electives, or as complete substitutes for Russian in all classes.
Based on data from the Ministry of Education, Takie Dela has calculated that between 2016 and 2023, the percentage of schoolchildren who study entirely in their native languages fell from 1.98 to 0.96 — the lowest figure for this period. The number of such pupils fell from 292,000 to 173,500, although the number of children in school increased by 3.2 million over those same seven years.
The share of those who studied native languages at clubs decreased from 0.7 to 0.4 percent. During the same period, the share of pupils who were taught their native languages as a separate subject increased from 10.41 to 10.56 percent. But the overall engagement of children in learning their native tongues decreased from 13.08 to 11.92 percent.
During the same period, instruction in thirty-eight languages, including Altai, Buryat, and Ingush, ceased completely. In 2016, there were still children in Russia who studied general subjects in those languages. There were no more such pupils left by 2023.
“Where the language is spoken at home, it provides an opportunity to master the written norms. This is vital to preserving people’s identity, to making them feel comfortable in society,” says sociolinguist Vlada Baranova.
According to the law, learning a native language in Russia is voluntary, so it is up to parents to decide how exactly it will be taught to their children and whether it will be taught at all.
Margarita Kilik, chair of the Association of Teachers of Native Languages of Kamchatka, argues that the decrease in the number of pupils studying their own languages is due to the desire of parents. “Fewer and fewer people are staying in the region,” she says. “They are leaving to study in the big cities, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. So there is simply no need for mother tongues.”
Which languages Russian schoolchildren studied as mother tongues in 2023. Drag your cursor arrow over each circle to see the total number of children who were studying that particular language as a native language. By clicking the “cog” icon in the lower righthand corner, you can access two sets of toggles that alter the map: 1) Форма изучение (“Form of instruction”), which shows whether a language was taught as a separate subject (pink) or used as a language of instruction (powder blue); and 2) Сколько детей узучают язык (“How many children study the language”), which alters the map to visualize the relative weight of the numbers and percentages of children who studied languages other than Russian in 2023. Source: Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation/Takie Dela.
And yet, interest in mother languages persists and often awakens with age, when it is more difficult to learn them, Kilik concedes. Natalia Antonova, editor-in-chief of the Karelian-language newspaper Vedlozero Windows, agrees with her. “It is difficult to get schoolchildren interested in something, especially studying minority languages. Often people who have already matured, whose parents have passed away, have regrets that they have been left without a linguistic thread linking them,” she says.
According to census data cited by the To Be Accurate project, the number of speakers of all of the Russian Federation’s official languages except Russian, Chechen, Tatar, and Tuvan declined between 2002 and 2020. But many textbooks of minority languages are designed for children who can speak them, even though the textbooks themselves have not been updated for a long time.
“Children who don’t know their native languages enter school. There are good textbooks structured to teach [these] languages as foreign languages, but these are more exceptions,” says Baranova.
In the Russian Federation, native languages are studied mainly in elementary and middle schools, while in grades 10 and 11 most teenagers switch to Russian, according to statistics from the Ministry of Education. “Graduates need to sit for the Unified State Exam, and general subjects taught in native languages won’t help them much,” says Vladislav Savelyev, a former Yakutia Education Ministry official.
Initiatives by the regions to produce a Unified State Exam in their native languages were never adopted. Meanwhile, the number of hours allocated for studying native languages at school has been reduced, activists have pointed out. “These issues are regulated by the federal educational standards, and, of course, the number of hours for teaching Yakut has been reduced in favor of priority subjects, such as mathematics,” says Savelyev.
Instruction in native languages in the Russian Federation. The numbers of children who studied in 2016–2023 in their native languages is indicated by the lavender bars, while their percentage within the overall school population is shown by the pink line and dots. Source: Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation/Takie Dela.
Savelyev also notes that schools are switching to a five-day school week and “optional” subjects like mother tongues are the first to have their hours cut from school schedules.
Another reason why the languages of Russia’s peoples may eventually disappear is the shortage of teachers specializing in them. According to data from the Institute for Statistical Research and Knowledge Economics at the Higher School of Economics, the number of native language teachers in Russian schools fell from 22,000 in 2009 to 15,500 in 2023. There are even fewer who can teach mathematics and history in languages other than Russian. “Seventy percent of the school teachers in the Koryak Autonomous District are from other regions. How can they know our languages? The situation is the same in many other regions,” Kilik points out.
The circumstances surrounding the teaching the official languages of the republics and the languages of minority Indigenous peoples differ greatly, however.
“We have several such languages in the Kamchatka Territory, and some of them even belong to different [linguistic] groups. A significant number of the teachers of these languages, as well as the speakers, are at least fifty-five to sixty years old. Who will teach the languages when they retire?” wonders Kilik.
Some languages, such as Aleut, have disappeared altogether in Kamchatka: Russia’s last speaker of the language, Gennady Yakovlev, died in 2022. Russian Aleuts used to cooperate with American Aleuts in preserving their language and culture, but this has now become impossible. “There are obstacles on both sides: our side says that America is an enemy country, while their side imposes sanctions on Russia,” says Kilik.
The situation is similar in Karelia, the only republic in the Russian Federation where the language of the titular nation does not have official language status. This is due to the fact that the Karelian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, while official languages in Russia must be written in the Cyrillic script alone.
According to official statistics, less than 500 children study the Karelian language at school, while 340 children study Vepsian. Instruction in these languages has been preserved only at specialized university departments and partly in kindergartens, says Antonova. “There are a couple of dozen kindergartens where the native language is learnt. But it’s more about the showy aspect of the language used in songs, costumes, and festivals,” she adds.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian Karelians have been assisted by Finnish Karelians in studying and preserving the Karelian language: textbooks have been published jointly, and language courses have been held jointly. “The break with Finnish organizations will certainly affect the opportunities for learning the Karelian language. Although it is not so noticeable yet, because little time has passed,” Antonova explains.
According to Antonova, Karelian is currently studied in clubs and courses at libraries, language centers and NGOs. Some of these organizations even receive state support, she adds.
Russian law obliges the state to preserve the languages of the peoples living in the Russian Federation and to promote their study.
‘This is a very divergent movement, and the situation depends very much on the region. In some places the authorities support languages, while in other places, on the contrary, they see their widespread use as going hand in glove with ethno-nationalism. But the policy is generally more aimed at Russification and reducing the use of minority languages,” explains Baranova.
Baranova notes that there is a downside to the fact that studying mother tongues is voluntary, as stipulated by law. In villages inhabited by speakers of endangered languages it is often possible to muster only one first grade class, and it will always be a Russian-speaking class.
“Because there will always be parents who want their child to be taught in Russian, and this is also their free choice. You can, of course, try to defend your position and demand that the school provide for another first grade class in the other language, but you’ll come across as suspicious and dangerous,” says Baranova.
Antonova also says that it has become more difficult to assert one’s linguistic rights.
“If campaigning for language revival was a common trend in the nineties, nowadays you can be accused of extremism and separatism, and the authorities will regard you with suspicion.”
Despite all this, there are ways to study native languages in Russia, says Baranova.
“Other forms and grassroots initiatives that get children and adults involved in using the language in different areas are also effective. They turn out to be a good way to keep the language alive.”
Source: “’Suspicious and dangerous’: schoolchildren in Russia now half as likely to study in their native languages,” Takie Dela, 9 September 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
DINARA RASULEVA & TATSIANA ZAMIROVSKAYA
“Lost Tongues, Found Voices, Decolonizing Languages: A Multilingual Reading and Conversation”
Wednesday, October 2, 6:30 pm
Hunter College CUNY
Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East Bldg)
Free and open to the public
Join Belarusian writer Tatsiana Zamirovskaya and Tatar poet_ess Dinara Rasuleva for a discussion on the loss and revival of languages. Dinara will talk about why languages of indigenous peoples colonized by Russia fade and how they are being brought back, sharing her translingual poems from the Lostlingual research series. Tatsiana will talk about why some Belarusian writers write in Russian, while still remaining Belarusian-identified authors, about her experience writing in a mix of Russian and Belarusian, and the challenges of translating colonized voices accurately. Both writers will reflect on the intersections of language and identity in their lives and works.
Dinara Rasuleva (she/they) is a poet_ess based in Berlin and born in Kazan, Tatarstan. She writes in Tatar, Russian, English and German — the languages she uses everyday. Dinara’s poetry was described and analyzed as decolonial and feminist writing, as expressionist poetry and performance poetry. In 2020 Dinara started a feminist writing laboratory for russian-speaking immigrant FLINTA community. In 2022 their first book of poems Su was published by Babel publishing house. Since 2022 Dinara started the Lostlingual Project, an investigation of the loss of her native Tatar language through translingual abstract poetry. In 2023, in collaboration with Berlin library Totschka, Dinara started TEL:L laboratories: writing in native forgotten or stolen languages.
Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a Belarusian author who moved to Brooklyn in 2015. She writes metaphysical sci-fi about memory, ghosts, hybrid identities and borders between empires and languages. She is the author of three collections of short stories and a novel Deadnet, published in Moscow in 2021, receiving great critical acclaim and shortlisted for several Russophone literary awards. She is a recipient of fellowships from Macdowell, Djerassi and VCCA. Currently Tatsiana is finishing her new collection of short stories about women going through unbearable events and how these events influence language and perception. She currently writes in belarusified Russian, russified Belarusian and broken English.
Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles.
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Source: Tamizdat Project newsletter, 21 September 2024
