Window on Eurasia

Russian Language Use Declining Inside Russia and Beyond

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 22, 2006 – Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the number of people speaking Russian actively or passively has declined by almost 20 percent, the largest fall of any major linguistic group during that period and one projected to continue in the future, according to demographers at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 1990, they report in the current issue of “Demoscope Weekly,”
350 million people spoke Russian as a first or second language. Now, only
278 million do, and the demographers project that this number will
decline to 212 million in 2025 and 152 million in 2025
[http://www.polit.ru/research/2006/08/17/demoscope251.html].

If the Moscow demographers are correct, Russian would be the only one
of the ten most widely-spoken languages in the world to suffer such a
decline, a development that almost certainly would result in its fall
from that group of language leaders into the second tier of ten or even
further.

Some of this decline reflects the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the
USSR itself, the report says. Another part of it is the product of the
demographic difficulties of the Russian nation. And still a third
reflects the Russian Federation’s diminished role in the world and
its focus on the export of raw materials rather than science and
technology.

But two things make it especially striking. On the one hand, it comes
after a period of remarkable growth in the number of people speaking
Russian: The number of those doing so in fact doubled from 150 million
in 1900 to 300 million in 1980 before reaching an apogee of 350 million
in the last year of Soviet power.

And on the other hand, the declines so far and even more the projected
declines in the future are far larger than the declines to date and
predicted for the number of ethnic Russians, a trend that suggests that
Russian language use is likely to become increasingly the province of
the Russians themselves.

Not surprisingly, the greatest declines in the number of people
speaking Russian either actively or passively have taken place in the countries
that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern
Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself.

In Soviet times, perhaps as many as 286 million people had some Russian
language knowledge. Now, the Moscow demographers say, of the 140
million people living in the former Soviet republics and Baltic states, 63.6
million speak Russian on a regular basis, 39.5 million have a passive
knowledge, and 38 million do not at all.

But the last category is growing rapidly especially among the young who
often choose to learn English or another international language in
preference to Russian. As a result, by 2015, the “Demoscope Weekly”
article predicts, the number of people in these countries who do not
know Russian at all will equal or exceed the number who do.

In the countries of the former Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, declines
in Russian langauge knowledge have been even more precipitous. In 1990,
according to estimates at the time, some 44 million people in these
countries had some knowledge of Russian. Now, only 19 million do, and
most of them have only a passive knowledge.

The number of people studying Russian in these countries has declined
dramatically. In Poland, for example, the number of students of Russian
fell by 90 percent between 1992 and 2004. And it shows no signs of
reviving there or anywhere else in that region.

As a result, the specialists who prepared the “Demoscope Weekly”
article project, the number of people in Eastern Europe knowing Russian
will fall to about ten million over the next decade, and only half of
those will know the language well enough to use it actively.

Elsewhere around the world, declines in the number of those studying
Russian has been almost as large in percentage terms. In the countries
of Western Europe, there were some 550,000 people studying Russian
language in 1990, but there are only 225,000 now.

In the United States, the declines in the number of students of Russian
language have been equally stark. After increasing from 24,000 in 1980
to 45,000 in 1990 at the time of glasnost’ and high hopes, the number
doing so has declined to 27,000 at the present time.

Moreover, the “Demoscope Weekly” notes what for some may be an
unexpected development: Although today there are far larger numbers of
Russian speakers born in the USSR than was the case earlier, most of
these new immigrants seek assimilation at least linguistically rather
than standing apart from their host cultures.But as “Demoscope Weekly” points out, there have been declines in the number of Russian speakers in their own country as well. Not only do 28 non-Russian languages enjoy some official support, but the number of ethnic Russians is declining, and government support for Russian language training among them has fallen as well.

Nonetheless, the article concludes, Russian almost certainly has a
bright future as the most important language of the Russian Federation,
even if it has lost the international role in which the Soviet
leadership placed so much hope and invested so heavily in earlier
decades.

And if the Russia eventually makes the transition from being primarily
an exporter of raw materials to being a significant center of
scientific and technological development, the Russian language could recover at
least part of its international role rendering the current bleak
projections null and void.

 

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