Applied Languages

Tajikistan is preparing to ban the use of Russian by state agencies and in official documents to boost the role of the local language, in what analysts see as either a move to win new financial support from Moscow or to demonstrate political independence.

But the move, criticized by a senior Russian lawmaker, could bring more damage than help to the impoverished country, where remittances sent back from Russia accounted for almost 50 percent of the economy last year, according to World Bank estimates.

Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon called on the government to speed up consideration of a bill that would require state agencies and companies to communicate with one another and issue official documents exclusively in Tajik. The bill would also make knowledge of the local language compulsory for every Tajik citizen, the report said.

“A speedy adoption of a new law about the [national] language is needed,” Rakhmon said in a televised address to the nation, according to a transcript on his official web site in the Russian and Tajik languages. “A state language … is an attribute of political independence,” he said.
Rakhmon’s televised address was dedicated to the anniversary of the law on the national language adopted on July 22, 1989. That law made Tajik the national language but gave every citizen the right to choose between Tajik and Russian when addressing state agencies.

Official Tajik web sites are published in Tajik, Russian and English. About 15 percent of the population is ethnic Uzbek, while Russians and Kyrgyz each comprise about 1 percent.

Alexei Ostrovsky, chairman of the State Duma’s CIS Affairs Committee, called the bill a “great mistake,” Interfax reported. He predicted that Russia would be “forced” in the future to ban the employment of Tajik migrants who do not know Russian, which would “aggravate the difficult economic situation of the majority” of Tajiks and could lead to street protests there.

Tajikistan borders Afghanistan and fought a civil war with Islamist rebels in the 1990s. Dushanbe and Moscow have been wrangling over financing for a half-completed hydropower station intended to help solve Tajikistan’s chronic power shortages.

Analysts said the language bill was a new chip in the political bargaining between Russia and Tajikistan. Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert with the German Council on Foreign Relations, said Tajikistan was trying to “show that it can do without Russia” and cooperate with countries such as China. But sidelining the Russian language would also impede “globalization processes” in Tajikistan, he said.

The proposed changes are not the first time Tajikistan’s president has sought to strengthen the status of the national language. In March 2007, Rakhmon dropped the Slavic “ov” from his surname and ordered that all babies born to Tajik parents do the same.

Saparmurat Niyazov, the eccentric former leader of Turkmenistan, banned teaching Russian in schools and ordered that diplomas issued in Russian universities not be recognized in the republic. In December 2007, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court banned the showing of movies in Russian and other foreign languages in Ukraine’s movie theaters despite objections from the country’s Russian-speaking eastern regions.

Read more: The Moscow Times

Speakers of regional languages in Spain are on the increase, with Catalan, a form of Occitan or Gascon, being spoken by about 5,000 people. Minority languages, fostered by regional and local governments, have undergone a revival in Spain since the end of the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s. The regime enforced control from the centre. Languages such as Catalan and Basque were banned from public use, and citizens were obliged to give their children Spanish names. The commonly used word for Spanish – castellano or Castilian – reveals the roots of the language in central Spain.

Linguistic revival in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic islands, the Basque country and Galicia has gone hand-in-hand with the steady increase in regional autonomy since a democratic constitution was introduced in 1978. Catalan and Basque nationalists in particular regard their languages – along with their political autonomy and specific legal systems – as essential to their sense of nationhood.

Catalan nationalists are lucky their language is already spoken by most Catalans and, like Galician, is easily mastered by any speaker of a romance language such as Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese.

Not so with Basque, which is spoken by only a minority of Basques, is of unknown origin, has a fiendishly complex grammar, and has no connection with romance tongues other than borrowings from them for modern words.

In central Spain and among Castilian-speakers, however, there are signs of irritation at the increasingly nationalistic language policies of some regions, as well as a belief that investors will be deterred by the fracturing of the Spanish state into linguistically distinct enclaves.

On the other hand, a sense of hostility to Spanish hegemony in Catalonia or the Basque country is often accompanied by a more international outlook and an eagerness to learn English or French.

The two most contentious areas are education – some residents of Catalonia and the Basque country want their children taught in Spanish – and public services such as hospitals, where local language tests can discriminate against doctors who do not speak the local language even if all their patients understand Spanish.

Nationalists, especially in Catalonia – where the local language is vibrant and widely spoken – say that if there are any language problems, they lie with monolingual Spaniards.

“The linguistic reality of Catalonia is that all the people who want can speak castellano. There’s no conflict,” says Antoni Castells, the urbane and multilingual Catalan finance minister. “Our aim is to make a bilingual society. There’s no Catalan who doesn’t speak Castilian, but on the other hand you can find people that speak only Castilian.”

These debates will continue across Spain, and doubtless in many languages, although the power of politicians to control the way languages develop is always dubious.

In the Basque country, Euskaltzaindia, the language academy in Bilbao, has spent decades trying to create a standard from the spoken dialects and has inevitably been accused of creating an “artificial” language, albeit one understood by up to 1m people and spoken daily by perhaps a quarter of those.

Now young Basques, according to Andrés Urrutia, who heads the academy, have started to speak an informal mixture of euskera (Basque) and español (Spanish) known as euskañol, which he says would disturb him if they started to write it as well.

So is the decline of the local language inevitable? “It is gaining people who speak it more often,” says Prof Urrutia. “I think what is inevitable is that we can’t be monolingual.”

Read more: Financial Times Deutschland

Education Secretary Jesli Lapus has signed Department of Education Order 74, nullifying the 35-year-old bilingual directive laid down in the 1970s on English and Filipino as the only languages of instruction. Neither of the languages is the first language of most Filipinos. Lapus said findings of various local initiatives and international studies in basic education have validated the superiority of the use of the learner’s mother tongue in improving learning outcomes and promoting Education For All.

He added the Order 74 institutionalizes the use of mother tongue as a fundamental educational policy and programme in the department in the whole stretch of formal education including preschool and in the Alternative Learning System. The policy widely referred to as mother tongue-based multilingual education aims to improve learning outcomes and promote Education For All.

Lapus cited findings from international and local research such as learners acquire reading skills more easily in their native than in their second language. Pupils who start to speak, read and write in their mother tongue learn a second language, like English, more quickly than those exclusively taught in a second language.

Learners develop cognitive, linguistic and academic competencies much faster in their native language than in a second language.
Under the new order, Filipino and English will be taught as separate subjects in the early grades and will be used as media of instruction when students are “ready.” This means when they have gained sufficient proficiency in the two second languages, as determined by the department, English and Filipino will remain the primary languages of teaching in high school, with the mother tongue as auxiliary and supplementary medium.

Lapus clarified that mother tongue-based multilingual education (MLE) will only be implemented at the level of the school, division and region after meeting certain conditions.  These include the establishment of a working orthography or spelling system; the formation of a technical working group to oversee the program; the development, production and distribution of culturally-relevant but inexpensive mother tongue materials; in-service MLE training of teachers; the use of the mother tongue for testing; and maximum participation and support from the local government unit, parents and community under the concept of school-based management.  The new policy also extends to the alternative learning systems and the madaris schools.

Philippine education stakeholders and linguistic experts have been clamoring for a change in the language-in-education policy. They have identified the disparity in the home and school languages as a major factor in the worsening functional literacy levels, high drop-out rates, and low learning outcomes among Filipino pupils.

Read more: Manila Standard Today