DURING the last few weeks, the term “russkiy mir”, which can roughly be translated as “Russian world”, gained increasing prominence in Russia. Although the term has not been widely used, it has been noticed by the public since Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his State of the Union address.
The president suggested creating the National Russian Language Foundation, which would “develop the Russian language at home, support Russian language study programs abroad and generally promote Russian language and literature around the world”. Some attempts have been made to put these ideas into practice. However, Russians continue to complain about the lack of opportunities for the development of Russian language, especially in the former Soviet republics.
The governments of Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and the Baltic states refused to give Russian the status of a second state language or even of the official language. In these countries, Russian is taught as one of several foreign languages, and schools encourage students to study English instead of Russian.
These countries, in many cases, have let English replace Russian as the main foreign language. In Estonia, for example, the decline of Russian speaking was exactly matched by a rise in English amongst young people.
“Introducing English as the main language of interethnic communication in the former Soviet Union will require a lot of time and effort. There is no need to speed up this process artificially by squeezing Russian out,” said Vitaly Kostomarov, president of the State Institute of Russian Language in Moscow.
Most Russian intellectuals and language experts suggest that viewing Russian and English as competitors or even viewing Russian as being in competition with national languages in the former Soviet republics is inappropriate.
