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Russian: a Monocentric Or Pluricentric Language?1 https://doi.org/10.11649/ch.2018.010 Colloquia Humanistica 7 (2018) Against Homogeneity. Transcultural and Trans-Lingual Strategies in Cultural Production COLLOQUIA HUMANISTICA Tomasz Kamusella School of History University of St Andrews St Andrews [email protected] Russian: A Monocentric or Pluricentric Language?1 Abstract All the world’s ‘big’ languages of international communication (for instance, English, French or Spanish) are pluricentric in their character, meaning that ofcial varieties of these languages are standardized diferently in those states where the aforesaid languages are in ofcial use. Te only exception to this tendency is Russian. Despite the fact that Russian is employed in an ofcial capacity in numerous post-Soviet states and in Israel, it is still construed as a monocentric language whose single and unifed standard is (and must be) solely 1 I thank Filip Tomić (Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia) who in May 2017 introduced me to the Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku (Te Declaration on the Common Language). Tis document constituted a decisive impulse for writing this article. Rok Stergar (University of Ljubljana) kindly commented on an earlier draf. As usual, words of thanks go to Catherine Gibson (European University Institute), who commented in detail on the entire manuscript. I also appreciate the two Anonymous Reviewers’ helpful comments and suggestions for improvement. Obviously, it is me alone who is responsible for any remaining infelicities. Some general ideas and conclusions included in this text were mentioned frst in the online edi- tion of New Eastern Europe, where on 9 February 2018 the article ‘Russian: Between Re-ethnici- zation and Pluricentrism’ (Kamusella, 2018b) was published. Tis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/), which permits redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, provided that the article is properly cited. © Te Author(s), 2018 Publisher: Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences Editor-in-chief: Jolanta Sujecka Conception and academic editing of this issue: Maciej Falski, Tomasz Rawski, Jolanta Sujecka with the collaboration of Ewa Niedziałek Tomasz Kamusella controlled by Russia. From the perspective of sovereignty, this arrangement afords Moscow a degree of infuence and even control over culture and language use in the countries where Russian is ofcial. Tis fact was consciously noticed and evoked some heated discussions in Ukraine afer the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014. However, thus far, the discussions have not translated into any ofcial recognition of (let alone encouragement for) state- specifc varieties of the Russian language. Keywords: de-ethnicization, hybrid war, language politics, monocentric languages, non-Russian Russophones, pluricentric languages, Russian language, Russophone states, Russo-Ukrainian war, state varieties of Russian. Introduction he end of history – as bravely proposed by Francis Fukuyama in T1992 in the wake of the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union (Fukuyama, 1992) – unfortunately came to an early and unexpected end in Europe in 2014 with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and onslaught on Ukraine, which led to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. One way or another, language politics has become an important part of the story, politicians taking decisions on the cue of language, and legitimizing decisions with this proverbial ‘puf of hot air’. Ethnolinguistic nationalism (or the equation of a language’s entire speech community with a nation) was developed in Central Europe during the 19th century. Subsequently, it was implemented in the following century with the sudden founding of ethnolinguistic nation-states, especially afer 1918 and 1989 (Kamusella, 2018a, pp. 173–174). Now in the early 21st century, it seems that this ideology has become another weapon in resurgent Russia’s ideological armoury geared to the needs of newly invented hybrid warfare (cf. Wasiuta & Wasiuta, 2017; Yashin, 2016). Tis weaponization of language has generated much discussion on the Russian language itself, frst of all, quite understandably, in Ukraine (cf. O’Loughlin, Toal, & Kolosov, 2016). Tis article probes into the status of Russian as seen from this perspective by speakers of this language, alongside politicians and scholars in the mainly post-Soviet states, where Russian functions as the or an ofcial (national, state) language. Te discussion opens with a brief overview of the globe’s ‘big languages’, each of them construed as consisting of state-specifc varieties. Russian is the sole exception to this principle of pluricentrism among the languages of this type. Tis generalized and rather unrefective insistence on the monocentric 154 COLLOQUIA HUMANISTICA RUSSIAN: A MONOCENTRIC OR PLURICENTRIC LANGUAGE? character of Russian appears to be a carry-over from the former Soviet Union, where practically all the Russian-speakers used to live. For a quarter of a century, the post-Soviet states bowed to the Kremlin’s unilateral and never openly discussed the Kremlin’s insistence that only Russia had the right to control the Russian language, meaning the principles and practices of its standardization. Te year 2014 was a sobering wake-up call, when Moscow frmly deployed Russian as an argument for extending pretensions to adjacent territories compactly inhabited by Russophone communities in Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Kazakhstan (Wasiuta, 2017). Tis was done on the basis of the assumption that each ‘native’ (L1) Russian- speaker must be a member of the Russian nation; this assumption was enshrined in the hastily adopted 2014 Russian citizenship law. As a result, ethnolinguistic nationalism was moulded into the ideological foundation of Russian neo-imperialism. However, the principle of sovereignty, as practiced consistently across the globe since the mass decolonization during the 1960s, does not allow other states to meddle in a given polity’s afairs, including language politics if that is of import for such a polity. Tat is why there are as many ‘world Englishes’ or ‘world Spanishes’ as there are states where these two languages are employed in an ofcial capacity. Unless the founding principles of international relations are dramatically altered, it is high time for the development of autonomous ‘world Russians’ in the post-Soviet states in order to forestall Russian aggression. Russia’s attack on Ukraine evoked a heated discussion on this subject in the latter country, followed closely in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Kazakhstan. Previously only few scholars and intellectuals had looked into this issue, especially when debating whether territorial varieties of Russian should be termed as dialects or regiolects and what it actually might mean. What is elsewhere the subject of scholarly debates in faculties of philology, literature and linguistics, now has become an instrument of neo- imperial politics as conducted by Russia in the post-Soviet states. As such this issue of the normative monocentrism of the Russian language and its ramifcations should be given more attention among political scientists. It appears that the survival of some post-Soviet states and the disarming of Russian neo-imperialism depend on the acceptance that numerous ‘world Russians’ exist, and each post-Soviet state should control its own. Reconstruing Russian as a pluricentric language is a small price to pay for peace and stability from Vladivostok to Vilnius and from Arkhangelsk to Dushanbe, and perhaps, to Tel Aviv. COLLOQUIA HUMANISTICA 155 Tomasz Kamusella World Languages: Decolonization, Pluricentrism and De-Ethnicization Rarely do scholars (let alone politicians) take note of the otherwise quite obvious fact that potentially (and in the socio-political reality, as observed nowadays) the most pluricentric of all the extant Slavic languages is Russian. All the globe’s ‘large’ (or ‘world’) languages are spoken and written by hundreds of millions in a myriad of polities. All of them are largely de- ethnicized lingua francas of former or current empires; all these empires with their centres (metropolises) located exclusively in Eurasia. Russian was (and to a degree still is) such an imperial lingua franca. Scholars noticed and began researching the phenomenon of pluricentric languages at the turn of the 1970s. One source of inspiration was the development of state-specifc varieties of German in the afermath of World War II (Clyne, 1992), and another a refection on the rapid rise of diferent ‘world Englishes’ in the wake of decolonization (“International Association for World Englishes”, 2018). Nowadays (according to the statistical fgures of 2010) about 76 million people speak French as their frst language, 92 million German, 215 million Portuguese, 295 million Arabic, 360 million English, 405 million Spanish, and 955 million Chinese (that is, Mandarin, standard Chinese). Tis ranking changes quite a bit when the cited numbers combine both speakers who use these Einzelsprachen2 as their frst languages (L1) and as second languages (L2). All the speakers of German as their frst and second language (L1 and L2) amount to 129 million, of French to 229 million, of Portuguese also to 229 million, of Arabic to 422 million, of Spanish to 527 million, of English to 983 million, and of Chinese to 1.09 billion. Te rate of de-ethnicization measured by the ratio of L1 to L2 speakers is the highest for English and French, in the case of which L1 speakers account only for a third of all the speakers, and the lowest for Chinese and Portuguese with L1 speakers amounting to more than 90 per cent of all the speakers of these two Einzelsprachen.3 Russian with its 155 million L1 (native) speakers – 2 In English it is difcult to express the semantic diference between ‘language’ as the biological (evolutionary) capacity for speech that does not take plural and is never preceded by an article, on the one hand, and ‘a language’ as a (cultural, human-constructed) actualization of this capacity, on the other. In the latter case this noun must be preceded by an article and enjoys a plural form.
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