Did Russian wipe out national languages?

March 29, 2006 8:48 AM

Did Russian replace other languages in Eastern Europe and the former USSR countries?

Specifically, how likely is it that a 30 year old Bulgarian & Moldovan dual citizen would speak only Russian and nothing else? CIA Factbooks for both countries say Bulgarian and Moldovan pretty much predominate, but I know Russian was taught in the schools for a while....

posted by Amizu to writing & language (28 comments total)

I know that in Armenia, up until the last fifteen or twenty years, if your parents didn't make a concerted effort to teach you Armenian, then you were going to learn Russian and maybe pick up some Armenian along the way, but not know much. It was banned from being taught in the schools. In Armenia at least, not knowing Armenian was a mark of someone who was a party faithful. This was many years ago, and the situation could've been different in every country.
posted by incessant at 8:55 AM on March 29, 2006

By "it" I mean Armenian was banned from being taught in the schools.
posted by incessant at 8:56 AM on March 29, 2006

My experience is from the Baltics, and breaks down like this: Almost all Latvians speak at least a little Russian, as well as many Estonians and Lithuanians. Young adults and kids often speak just a little, especially if they are from areas with small minorities of Russian speakers. Adults in the Baltics all had Russian in school, and Russian was an official language during Soviet occupation. Don't know about Bulgaria and Moldova, though, but the one Moldovan I know speaks very good Russian...

And for nitpickers: Yes, I know the Baltics are not in Eastern Europe, but maybe the poster didn't make the distinction...
posted by Harald74 at 8:56 AM on March 29, 2006

I visited Latvia pretty soon after their renewed independence from Russia, and the language issue there was complicated. There was, in what was called the Soviet Era, a substantial migration of ethnic Russians to the colonized parts of the USSR. In Latvia's case, this meant that in the early 90s, at least half of the population were ethnic Russian and in general never learned much Latvian.

Subsequently, there were calls from some politicians to tie citizenship to language, and to name Latvian as the only official language but I believe this was unsuccessful as Russia and the international community (rightly) put a LOT of pressure on Latvia to not legally exclude native ethnic Russians who had never learned Latvian.

What does that mean? In former parts of the Soviet Union I think it is more than possible, though unlikely for the younger generation who is still employed/active in the economy, to speak only Russian.

I don't think that would hold true for former parts of the Eastern Bloc that retained their formal independence however, though a large proportion of people would speak Russian as a second language.
posted by mikel at 9:01 AM on March 29, 2006

I believe the use of native languages was strongly discouraged by the Soviet Union, so it's not unlikely someone wouldn't know the language from their native country.

Of course, after the break-up this means some natives get really, really pissed about speaking in Russian. Language of the oppressors and all that.
posted by schroedinger at 9:03 AM on March 29, 2006

I was a Soviet History major as an undergrad, but I focused on the Caucasus region.

Anyway, in most Soviet Republics, schools in Russian and the local language were available. GENERALLY, people got a better education in Russian language schools. They tended to have more up-to-date books.

Also, learning in a Russian school opened doors for people to study at larger (better?) universities, such as in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Russian also dominated the sciences.

I'd need to know where your friend grew up to give you more specifics on how the politics of language played out. It is a very interesting topic though.

To schroedinger, the politics of language vary republic to republic.
posted by k8t at 9:09 AM on March 29, 2006

Ditto. Complicated, almost-colonial situation here. In the Baltics, a substantial migration of ethnic Russians following Stalin's occupation changed demographics substantially, making native-Russian speakers major presences in those countries. In addition, ethnic Estonians/Latvians/Lithuanians were discouraged from learning the native language for fear of stoking nationalism. The same happened to a lesser extent in the Caucasian and Central Asian republics as well - but industrialization and centralized schooling meant that most native non-Russian speakers got along as Russian as their first language.

In the Eastern Bloc, the situation was a lot less so. Soviet "friendship" meant Russian was a required language in schools and something that any go-getting young East German/Pole/Czech would be well-advised to master... But as for any attempts to make Eastern Bloc states switch to a Cryillic alphabet or anything similar, nah.

But then there's the case of Yugoslavia - where Serbians and Croatians traditionally spoke a virtually identical language but written in the Latin alphabet (Croatians) or Cyrillic (Serbian) depending on the region. Tito made an effort to standardize Cyrillic that ultimately failed during the 70s.

For the Bulgarian/Moldovan situation - If they grew up in Moldova in a city or were an ethnic Russian, I could definitely see it happen.
posted by huskerdont at 9:13 AM on March 29, 2006

the Baltics are not in Eastern Europe

*looks at map*

Where are they then?
posted by the cuban at 9:19 AM on March 29, 2006

I believe the use of native languages was strongly discouraged by the Soviet Union, so it's not unlikely someone wouldn't know the language from their native country.

This is not true (or not as stated), and it's highly unlikely a Bulgarian wouldn't know Bulgarian. I'm not sure why we're talking about the situation in Latvia and the like, since the poster has told us where the person in question is from... but not enough about the person. Is the person Bulgarian or Moldovan in background? If the former, they almost certainly speak Bulgarian unless they were taken out of the country as a child; if the latter, it's much more complicated, because Moldova (formerly Bessarabia) has a very checkered history, having been ruled for a long time by Turks (using Greek proxies) and Russians, even though the base population is Romanian (and there's another chunk of Moldavia in the country of Romania), and there are large numbers of ethnic Russians, particularly in the eastern part of the country (trans-Dniestr), which is why it's de facto independent (and a real hellhole, but that's another issue). If you can tell us something more about the person, we'll be better able to advise.
posted by languagehat at 9:20 AM on March 29, 2006

Okay. She was born in Chadir-Lunga, Moldova, but her mother is ethnically Bulgarian, and she grew up in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. I'm not sure of her father's ethnicity. I do know both her parents were born in Plovdiv. Does that help?
posted by Amizu at 9:29 AM on March 29, 2006

From what I know (having spent a bit more than a year in the region), in the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland, and Hungary - the ex-communist countries of Central Europe, that is - Russian was never more than a mandatory second-language in school, and was never used with any frequency. Most people who finished their primary education before '89, though they had to take courses in Russian, have deliberately forgotten it since; people tend to be taken quite aback by the occasional well-meaning tourist who thinks he can communicate po rusky throughout the region, not realizing how sensitive people are to the connotations, even if they do remember a bit of it.

In Moldova, on the other hand, I've heard that nearly everyone is at least bilingual, and there are plenty of monolingual Russian speakers in the capital cities (both of them). Russian has been used at least as much as the native language in Ukraine and Belarus, and in the Baltics to a lesser extent (but especially Latvia). Ukrainians, especially in L'viv, are using their language more and more to distance themselves from Moscow, though it's still possible to communicate in Russian nearly everywhere. I'm under the impression that Belarussians are more apathetic about this, and ever fewer actually speak the pure form of Belarussian rather than a mix of the two languages.

In Latvia, there was actually legislation at one point to protect the Latvian language from being completely overwhelmed by Russian; all official/political communication and public signage had to be in Latvian, and fluency is also required for citizenship (bad news for some 30% of the population made up of Russians who settled during the long occupation; there's still plenty of rancour between the two populations). My Lonely Planet (from 2003) notes that "Latvians are a minority in Latvia's seven largest cities", and today, you'll still here plenty of Russian in the capitals of Latvia and Estonia, though it's scarce in Lithuania.

I'm guessing your girl speaks Bulgarian primarily, if not exclusively; she may know some Russian, but I don't think it was ever used in the Balkans nearly as much as in the Baltics. If she's 30 now, she probably didn't take Russian at school after she was 15, if she ever did, and has had plenty of time to forget it if so. If she's ever lived in Moldova she probably has some Romanian, too; i'd actually guess that she speaks Romanian before Russian, or maybe even Serbian. And/or whatever her father speaks, of course.
posted by xanthippe at 9:38 AM on March 29, 2006

If she's Bulgarian, she was never a Soviet citizen.

If she was Moldovan, she would have been a Soviet citizen.

But perhaps in Bulgaria she may have gone to a Russian language school... as her mother may have as well. But I can't imagine that in Bulgaria such schools existed commonly.

She may in fact speak Bulgarian, but only the "kitchen" variety that one learns before attending school. Household and food words dominate. I had a friend that started school in English at age 5, but didn't know the English word for mop.
posted by k8t at 9:46 AM on March 29, 2006

I'm guessing your girl speaks Bulgarian primarily, if not exclusively; she may know some Russian...

She says she speaks only Russian and nothing else whatsoever. No Bulgarian, no Moldovan, no Romanian.

I'm not sure how long she lived in Moldova and how long she lived in Bulgaria - she says she only lived in those two countries, though.
posted by Amizu at 9:48 AM on March 29, 2006

Where are they then?

Northern Europe. Maybe, Eastern Scandinavia? Confusion results usually from Baltics vs Balkans (the latter being the Yugolavian neighborhood, which is defintely Eastern Europe). Baltics are easier to locate on a map, due to the plainly-labeled Baltic Sea.
posted by Rash at 10:00 AM on March 29, 2006

Is her father Russian, then? What about her mom: Russian or Romanian - err, Moldovan?

you'll still here plenty of Russian That is, 'hear', of course.
posted by xanthippe at 10:07 AM on March 29, 2006

Her mom is Bulgarian. I'm not sure about her dad. I think either Bulgarian or Moldovan, but I'm not sure.
posted by Amizu at 10:12 AM on March 29, 2006

Northern Europe. Maybe, Eastern Scandinavia?

It doesn't work like that. When you're talking pure geography, you can put any labels you want on it; it's also in the northern hemisphere (or the eastern hemisphere). When you're talking about Eastern and Western Europe, the Baltic states are in Eastern Europe. A good friend of mine is from Estonia, and he would refer to the region as a whole as Eastern Europe. Saying that the Baltics can't be Eastern Europe because they're Northern Europe is like saying Nebraska isn't the midwest because it's the northern United States. It's a cute dodge, but, well, it's wrong.
posted by bingo at 10:31 AM on March 29, 2006

I find your friend's story very dubious, especially if she grew up in Bulgaria.

85% of the approximate 8.7m population of Bulgaria speak the official language, Bulgarian. 2.5% speak Macedonian, considered in Bulgaria as a dialect of Bulgarian and not as a separate language. Other minority languages include Romani, Turkish, spoken by 9% of the population, and the related languages of Gagauz, Tatar, and Albanian.

The official language is Bulgarian, and nearly all inhabitants speak it. About half of the Turkish population speaks Turkish as a native language, but most also speak Bulgarian. ... Russian was previously a required subject in school, so many people can speak it, but Bulgarian is the language of instruction.

Having spent the last 5.5 years living in Austria, I've met many Eastern Europeans (including Bulgarians) but have never come across anyone who speaks Russian and not the mother tongue of his or her own country.

I'm sure your friend's story is possible, but it doesn't strike me as very plausible based on my anecdotal experience.
posted by syzygy at 10:42 AM on March 29, 2006

It certainly replaced Yiddish in many countries, and people were jailed for "Zionism" for speaking and teaching that language. And while Jews were assured of their "freedom of practice of culture," synagogues were stripped of most religious acoutrement.

Although it should be noted that a "Soviet Jewish homeland," Birobidzhan, was created, and Yiddish was (and may still be in some pockets!) its national language. However, some say this was more an easy way to get politically active Jews out of Soviet cities to a rural area where they could be safely ignored.
posted by luriete at 11:03 AM on March 29, 2006

Yes, it is very strange - if her mother is actually Bulgarian, instead of another Russian who ended up with a Bulgarian passport. ?
posted by xanthippe at 12:12 PM on March 29, 2006

I can't say much about you specific question, but I know that many of those smaller languages which didn't belong to any clear (former) nation is now struggling. By these languages I mean languages belonging to nomadic tribes and/or languages which were minority languages in another nation before being swallowed up by the Sovjet.

In many of these cases the language was doubly threatened. Example of this is many of the finnish-ugric languages in Karelia and in the Baltic states (although these may have been threatened before this), and also other languages. I have a friend (my age, 30 years old) who is Tatar, but she doesn't speak the language, her older sister does, but when the parents realised that she was having more trouble in the Russian-speaking school than the other children they stopped speaking Tatar at home thinking my friend would get an "advantage" at school. I have heard similar stories about speakers of Mari (Mordvin, Cheremis) where there's (or was, seven years ago when I studied it) a struggle to replace, or rather re-replace Mari, which had fallen out of favour.

I am now not answering you question very well, I just ramble on on one of my favourite subjects... Well, anyway, about your friend, well she might speak only Russian, especially if she was brought up in Moldova, and moved (?) to Bulgaria later on, where she may have gotten around knowing Russian.
posted by mummimamma at 1:13 PM on March 29, 2006

Did Russian replace other languages in Eastern Europe and the former USSR countries?
Russian did not replace the official languages in the non-USSR countries. Russian only became the international language, like English in the West, and was taught in schools as a foreign language. But even so, by the 80's, many Eastern European kids were not taught Russian, in school, anymore.

Bulgaria was not part of the USSR, so it is extremely strange that somebody who grew up in Plovdiv doesn't speak Bulgarian at all. However, if she grew up in Moldova, it was not out of the ordinary to speak only Russian, especially in certain parts of the country.
posted by Ervin at 1:15 PM on March 29, 2006

I'm with syzygy. Based on what you've told us, especially "grew up in Plovdiv," the idea that she only speaks Russian is dubious bordering on preposterous. It would be like growing up in, say, Nicaragua (with a Nicaraguan mother) and not speaking Spanish.

I have to admit I'm curious about why you're asking: are you suspicious of her bona fides in general and using this as a wedge issue to evaluate her credibility? None of my business, of course, and I'll be happy to sit down and shut up.
posted by languagehat at 1:31 PM on March 29, 2006

There is a sizable Bulgarian minority in the south of Moldova, many of whom no longer speak Bulgarian but maintain an ethnic identity as a minority. I know some Bulgarian women who are fantastic musicians and are quite popular among Romanian nationalist types over the border in Romania for playing extremely down-home Romanian folk music. Nobody ever mentions that their family name is Stoyanov....

Depending on where you are things are different - some minority languages are quite resiliant and robust, other much less so. In Moldova, the rural population is overwhelmingly Romanian speaking, with minority languages like Gagauz still mintaining. In the cities, Russian tends to dominate, since Russian speakers tened to be settled in towns, and expecially over the last few years during which the communist-successor party took over and tried to reinstate Russian as the official language of education and government.

In Hungary, less than 1% of school children chose to learn Russian, which was once an eight year required language. Very few Hungarians under 50 admit to having learned any of it at all.
posted by zaelic at 4:01 PM on March 29, 2006 [1 favorite]

In Moldova, on the other hand, I've heard that nearly everyone is at least bilingual, and there are plenty of monolingual Russian speakers in the capital cities (both of them).

Most people in the major cities--Chişinău, Bălţi and Cahul are bilingual. Most people from the countryside speak Romanian and have limited knowledge of Russian. They were not as affected by the Soviet attempts to eradicate Romanian as the language of the largely Romanian population.
There are also many monolingual Russians who are not integrating into the ethnically Romanian society in Bessarabia. They remain due to the fact that over 65% of the authorities in Chişinău in 1990 were Russian speakers. This was part of an orchestrated attempt on the part of the Soviets to marginalize and weaken the largely Romanian majority in Bessarabia, which had been unter Russian control since late 1944.

The Republic of Moldova has only one capital--Chişinău. Tiraspol, the de facto seat of power in the breakaway region Transnistria (annexed to Bessarabia by the Soviets from Ukraine in 1945), is not a dual capital, but rather a large city in Transnistria, which is under Russian control, by way of the 14th Battalion.

Apropos to your question, I agree that it is highly unlikely for a Bulgarian not to speak Bulgarian, although it is fairly common for a Ukrainian not to speak Ukrainian or perhaps a Russian in Moldova not to speak Romanian.

It is possible that someone who left the MSSR before 1989 might not have properly learned to read and write Romanian and therefore would number with the thousands of other "Moldovans" who speak Russian and have no knowledge or appreciation of Bessarabia as a part of the Romanian cultural hearth.
posted by vkxmai at 4:03 PM on March 29, 2006

I'll add that a lot of the Bulgarian Moldovans came from the Plovdiv area originally, and there was a lot of back and forth, given that Bulgarians were the East European people mnost friendly to the idea of Russian domination...

they originally migrated to Bessarabia (the old name for eastern Moldavia) between 1780 and 1835, inspired to physically relocate away from Turkish rule. The Russians had to find settlers for the Bugeac steppes around Kagul, so they went, as did many of the Gagauzi from the area around Varna and Balchik.

These days there is a housing project on the southern outskirts of Plovdiv which is home to about a thrid of the original Bessarabian Bulgarian population, who have chosen to move to Bulgaria, given that Moldavia's economy and prospects are pretty dim...
posted by zaelic at 4:06 PM on March 29, 2006

Lots of excellent answers to this question. I'd mark lots of them as best answers. Helpful info.
posted by Amizu at 6:18 PM on March 29, 2006

Bessarabia (the old name for eastern Moldavia)

This statement is correct, however, Bessarabia is viewed by many Romanian speakers in the Republic of Moldova as the more legitimate name of their region, because identifying themselves as Moldovans simply completes the Soviets' plan sixty years ago to create cultural and linguistic distinctions between the Romanians in Bessarabia, ie between Prut and Nistru Rivers, and those in neighboring Moldova, Bukovina or Dobrogea, by deporting portions of the Romanian population and replacing these portions with Russian speakers from Ukraine and other parts of the USSR.

Moldova is the commonly used short form for the Republic of Moldova, which is made up of Bessarabia and Transnistria. Moldavia is no longer used in any official or unofficial capacity and reflects a distinctly russified worldview, carrying on the "-avia" ending of the name, which came from the Russian "Moldavya." This Russian orthographic tradition is still commonly used in French "la Moldavie" and, to a lesser extent, in German "Moldawien." Both languages easily provide a closer approximation to the correct name of The Republic of Moldova with "La republique moldovane" and "Republik Moldau."
posted by vkxmai at 6:52 PM on March 29, 2006