Languages ​​in Belarus

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The linguistic situation in Belarus is characterized by the historical coexistence of various linguistic codes. The most common today are Belarusian , Russian and the so-called Trassyanka , a form of mixed speech in which Belarusian and Russian elements and structures alternate in rapid succession.

history

The earliest known texts from the ethnically Belarusian areas date from the 12th century. These are written monuments written in Church Slavonic , mostly legends of saints and sermons. In the 13th and 14th centuries, there was an increasing number of texts, especially documents, which today have characteristics in phonetics, grammar and lexicons that are considered to be typically Belarusian. The proportion of elements of Church Slavonic and autochthonous East Slavonic dialects, including the Belarusian, in the early East Slavic texts is disputed in individual cases. In general, however, it can be said that in highly valued text genres, especially religious texts, Church Slavonic predominated, while on the other hand the vernacular clearly dominated in everyday texts.

In the late 14th and 15th centuries, the Church Slavonic religious scriptures were archaized, known as re-Bulgarization, in order to counteract the alleged falsification of the divine word by vernacular influences. This again increased the comprehensibility of Church Slavonic for the general public. This and the political rise of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , which had a predominantly Slavic population, contributed to the emergence of a written language on an autochthonous East Slavic basis. This developed as a Koine from dialects that bordered on the administrative centers of the Grand Duchy. It was the state language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and was mainly used in authorities, chancelleries and diplomatic correspondence, but in the course of time it penetrated more and more into the domains of Church Slavonic. In contemporary sources it was referred to as "ruskij jazyk", which has led to the fact that it is claimed by the "patriotic" Russian historiography to this day as part of Russian language history. The nationally oriented Belarusian linguistic historiography, on the other hand, claims the mentioned language as Old Belarusian for itself, which is also problematic in that at that time no separate Belarusian identity in the current sense had developed. In German, the term Ruthenian is also in use, but it often refers to the southern (from today's perspective Ukrainian) variant of the state language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

After the Union of Lublin and the Ecclesiastical Union of Brest , the influence of the Polish language and culture in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania increased, which led to the loss of importance of Ruthenian and finally to the ban (1696) of its use in official documents. The survival of Belarusian linguistic elements was subsequently ensured primarily through the dialects and orally transmitted folklore. After the partitions of Poland , Polish initially remained the socially dominant language in today's Belarus, but was then replaced by Russian , especially after the November uprising.

In the course of Romanticism in the 19th century, poets and intellectuals with ancestry from today's Belarusian areas were inspired by the language used by the rural population there and thus created a new basis for the modern written Belarusian language that was not linked to the state language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The language policy of the Russian Empire regarded Belarusian as a dialect of Russian and after the January uprising of 1863, in which Belarusians were also involved, prohibited all - initially tentative - efforts towards linguistic and cultural independence.

The efforts to create a modern Belarusian written language became more intense after the liberalization following the Russian Revolution in 1905 , when, among other things, the printing ban on Belarusian fonts was lifted. The newspaper Nascha Niwa , published from 1906 to 1915 and published by the masterminds of the Belarusian national movement at the time, played an outstanding role in the development of language norms . Belarusian first found its way into the school system under German occupation in the German occupation area of Upper East, which existed from 1915 to 1918 .

In the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic , in accordance with Lenin's nationality policy, a policy of Belarusification of public life and the terminological expansion of the Belarusian language was first pursued. At the beginning of the 1930s, however, the Soviet state and party leadership began its ideological struggle against supposed "local nationalism", which led to severe repression and even physical annihilation of the nationally-minded Belarusian intelligentsia in the course of the 1930s and 1940s . In 1934, Russian was declared the national lingua franca in the entire Soviet Union, and in 1938, students in all schools in the non-Russian Soviet republics were required to learn Russian. The policy in western Belarus, on the other hand, which belonged to the Polish state in the interwar period, was aimed at long-term assimilation of the Belarusian population through the Polish school system and Roman Catholicism.

The industrialization and urbanization of Soviet Belarus, which after 1945 also included the previously Polish areas, had a decisive influence on linguistic development in the post-war decades. The Belarusians thus became the predominant nationality for the first time in the formerly Russian, Jewish and Polish cities. At the same time, however, Belarus developed into the Soviet republic with the highest influx of Russians, who often took up professional management positions and thus contributed to the role of Russian as the language of social advancement. As a result, dialect speakers of Belarusian who moved from the countryside to the city tried to adapt to the Russian-speaking environment. In this way, the intensive Belarusian-Russian language mixture Trassjanka spread , which was also passed on to the following generation. A law passed by the Supreme Soviet of the Byelorussian Soviet Republic in 1959 enabled students in Russian-speaking schools to be exempted from teaching Belarusian. In 1978 the Council of Ministers of the USSR decided to introduce Russian lessons in all first grades of non-Russian-speaking schools, which further weakened the position of Belarusian.

In the course of perestroika , the upgrading of the Belarusian language became a decisive demand of the nationally minded intelligentsia, who began to organize themselves in the Belarusian Popular Front and, more closely related to the language, the Society for the Belarusian Language . Under pressure from this movement, the Supreme Soviet of the Belarusian Soviet Republic passed a language law in 1990 that made Belarusian the only state language.

Development since the collapse of the Soviet Union

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Belarusian Language Act remained in force and a Belarusification policy was pursued, the aim of which was to translate the most important areas of public life into Belarusian within ten years. Particular attention was paid to the school system. Large sections of the population rejected the Belarusification policy, which Aljaksandr Lukashenka took up in his first presidential campaign in 1994. After his election in 1995, under democratically questionable circumstances, he initiated a referendum in which, according to official information, 88.3% of the participants pleaded for Russian to be legally equated with Belarusian. In the new version of the Language Act, Russian was named as the state language alongside Belarusian. In practice, this ended the policy of positive discrimination in favor of Belarusian, as either Russian or Belarusian could be used in all essential areas of public life. Due to the decades of dominance of Russian, this resulted in a de facto predominant use of Russian. Especially in the second half of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, the public use of Belarusian outside of education and culture became a symbol of oppositional sentiments, which was reinforced by Lukashenka's disparaging remarks about the Belarusian language. In view of some political and economic conflicts with Russia since the mid-2000s and the role of Russia in the Ukraine crisis , however, a certain rhetorical revaluation of the Belarusian language has recently been noticed, which has not yet been reflected in a change in the actual language policy.

In the previous Belarusian censuses of 1999 and 2009, questions were asked on the one hand about the mother tongue and on the other hand about the language commonly used at home. In 1999, 85.6% of citizens of Belarusian nationality named Belarusian and 14.3% Russian as their mother tongue, in 2009 60.8% said Belarusian and 37.0% said Russian. When asked about the language commonly used at home in 1999, 41.3% of Belarusians said Belarusian, 58.6% Russian; In 2009 the values ​​were 26.1% for Belarusian and 69.8% for Russian. A more recent, at the University of Oldenburg located somewhere sociolinguistic research project on the situation in Belarus has pointed out the unreliability of the questions in the censuses and surveys the trasianka as an additional response category besides Belarusian and Russian added (with the designation as "Belarusian-Russian mixed language"). Multiple answers were also allowed. In response to the question of Belarusians about their mother tongue (s), around 49% were mentioned for Belarusian, 38% for Trassyanka and 30% for Russian. Around 50% named Trassjanka as their first language (s), 42% Russian and 18% Belarusian. As the main language used - multiple answers were not possible here - 55% of the Belarusians surveyed stated Russian, 41% Trassyanka and 4% Belarusian.

In addition to Russian, Belarusian and Trassyanka, the languages ​​of national minorities are much less common in Belarus. According to the 2009 census, the vast majority of non-Belarusians use Russian on a daily basis.

Language commonly spoken at home,% of population of respective ethnic group according to 2009 census
nationality Population in thousands Belarusian Russian
total 9,504 23.4 70.2
Belarusians 7,957 26.1 69.8
Russians 785 2.1 96.5
Poland 295 40.9 50.9
Ukrainians 159 6.1 88.4
Jews 13 2.0 95.9

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ G. Hentschel: Belarusian and Russian in the Mixed Speech of Belarus. In: J. Besters-Dilger et al. (Ed.): Congruence in Contact-Induced Language Change: Language Families, Typological Resemblance, and Perceived Similarity. Berlin / Boston 2014, pp. 93–121.
  2. ^ A. McMillin: Belorussian. In: A. Schenker, E. Stankiewicz (Eds.): The Slavic literary languages. Formation and development. New Haven 1980, pp. 105-117.
  3. ↑ M. Pryhodzič: Z historyi belaruskaj movy i Jaje vyvučėnnja. In: A. Lukašanec et al. (Rėd.): Belaruskaja mova. Opole 1998, pp. 13-24.
  4. ↑ B. Uspenskij: Istorija russkogo literaturnogo jazyka (XI-XVII vv.). Munich 1987.
  5. ^ H. Birnbaum: On the significance of the second south Slavic influence for the evolution of the Russian literary language. In: International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics. 21, 1975, pp. 23-50.
  6. ↑ a b c H. Cychun: Belarusian. In: M. Okuka (Hrsg.): Lexicon of the languages ​​of the European East. Klagenfurt 2002, pp. 563-579.
  7. ↑ M. Brüggemann: Indispensable Russian, dispensable Belarusian? Russophone on the history and use of language in Belarus. In: S. Kempgen et al. (Ed.): German contributions to the 15th International Slavist Congress Minsk 2013. Munich et al. 2013, pp. 89–98.
  8. ↑ S. Plokhy: The origins of the Slavic nations: premodern identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Cambridge 2006.
  9. ^ J. Dingley: Languages ​​in Belarus up to the end of the 19th century. In: D. Beyrau, R. Lindner (Hrsg.): Handbook of the history of Belarus. Göttingen 2001, pp. 437-450.
  10. ↑ M. Brüggemann: The Belarusian and Russian languages ​​in their relationship to Belarusian society and nation. Ideological-programmatic standpoints of political actors and intellectuals 1994–2010. (= Studia Slavica Oldenburgensia. 23). Oldenburg 2014.
  11. ↑ a b K. Gutschmidt: Language policy and linguistic situation in Belarus since 1989. In: B. Panzer (Ed.): The linguistic situation in Slavia ten years after the fall of the Wall. Frankfurt am Main et al. 2000, pp. 67-84.
  12. ↑ B. Plotnikaŭ: External causes for the limited use of the Belarusian language. In: The world of the Slaves. 45, 2000, pp. 49-58.
  13. ^ Hermann Bieder : Denomination, ethnicity and language in Belarus in the 20th century. In: Journal for Slavic Studies. 45, 2000, pp. 200-214.
  14. ^ A b c M. Brüggemann: Between reference to Russia and independence: on language policy in Belarus'. In: Europa ethnica. 3–4, 2014, pp. 88–94.
  15. ↑ G. Hentschel and others: Trasjanka and Suržyk - mixed Belarusian-Russian and Ukrainian-Russian speech: Linguistic incest in Belarus and the Ukraine? Frankfurt am Main et al. 2014.
  16. ↑ S. Zaprudski: In the grip of replacive bilingualism: the Belarusian language in contact with Russian. In: International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 183, 2007, pp. 97-118.
  17. ↑ a b p Zaprudski: Language policy in the Republic of Belarus in the 1990s. 2000.
  18. ↑ G. Hentschel, B. Kittel: Belorussian trilingualism? On the linguistic situation in Belarus on the basis of judgments by Belarusians about the spread of their languages ​​in the country. In: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. 67, 2011, pp. 107-135.
  19. ↑ belstat.gov.by