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Negotiating Belarusian as а ‘National Language’
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Вышел текст о языке здесь: Linguistic Changes in Post-Communist Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Часть материала новая, часть - собрала написанное на трех языках, на которых публикуюсь. О чем: "по Бурдье", т.е. язык как капитал и какова "выгода" тех, кто за него ратует или его отвергает.


Elena Gapova

Negotiating Belarusian as а ‘National Language’

Belarusian is sometimes seen as a language “with a problem,” being neither fully established, nor completely non-existent, and linguists writing about it register the dual character of it as both “titular” and “minority language.”1 In this paper I will try to dissect the “political economy” involving the complex status of Belarusian—the reasons why this language is spoken by some and rejected by others, what interests its speakers and promoters are investing in it at the symbolic market, where languages differ in their value, and how the use and promotion of Belarusian language in the post-Soviet era turns out to be a product and a form of power, or disempowerment, in the flow of social interaction.

In the fall of 2005 Harvard University organized a two-day symposium titled “The Arts, National Identity and Cultural Politics in Belarus.” As a related cultural event, the Yakub Kolas Academic Drama Theater from Vitebsk was invited to Massachusetts to present two plays. One of them tells the story of work and death of Bronislaw Taraszkiewicz, the author of the first Belarusian grammar textbook (1918), purged as a bourgeois nationalist in the 1930s. The message of the play is the glorification of his livelong struggle for asserting and legitimating the “people’s language.” After the performance, which is played in Belarusian, as all other performances by the national theatre, the actors got together at the building’s entrance to wait for the coach bus, which was supposed to take them to their hotel. Discussing some minor matters, they spoke Russian, which is the language they use daily in their private and public lives, except when on stage and performing their “professional duties.”

This tiny sitcom is just one link in a bigger chain of similar facts. A journalist described in a newspaper (I cannot find the link) how Belarusian “bards,” i.e. rock singers and performers, participating in the democratic opposition rallies, speak Russian while checking their equipment, and immediately switch to Belarusian to perform on behalf of the “nation,” as soon as the microphones are turned on.

In 2001, «Nasha niva» independent Belarusian weekly published a special issue on the national language. The newspaper was recreated in 1991 as a symbolic “continuation” of that first “Nasha niva,” which at the turn of the 20th century had become the voice of the “Belarusian national cause.” That legendary newspaper entered all Belarusian history and literature textbooks: having published some programmatic verse by young national poets, it sought to awaken the largely peasant population to education, inclusion into modernity and, desirably, self-determination.

The post-perestroika “Nasha niva” was re-invented by a group of intellectuals with the idea that it would play a similar role of uniting the post-Soviet Belarusian nation, preferably, around the same ideas and a similar orthographical canon. That did not happen,2 though, and the reason for the special issue became the fact that Belarusian, after an upsurge of interest in it in the early 1990s, did not develop any support base. It was coming out of use even among the opposition, whose activities had been initially inspired by the “national sentiment”:

A visible recent tendency in Minsk is the opposition rallies in Russian... Back in 1995, one could imagine quite a lot, but not that Russian would be the language of struggle for a democratic future.3

In 2007 the newspaper organized another linguistic discussion, this time focused on the two versions of Belarusian orthography, which came to symbolize two incompatible national projects, a “Soviet” and an “anti-Soviet” (I will provide a detailed explanation further in the text). One of the participants, describing the language situation, stated:

“These days, one cannot hear a Belarusian word from any high-ranking official, a parliament member or a military officer…” Another one recognized “the indifference of the main part of the community to the language issue.” 4

Evidently, in the post-Soviet world Belarusian failed to become an instrument for social mobilization, as had been the hope during the perestroika, and my interest in this text is to provide an explanation for the mass rejection of it as “the national language.” As I am trying to understand why some people choose to speak Belarusian, in spite of the obstacles they have to overcome, while others equally passionately reject it, and how this behavior is embedded into the relations of power and expression of authority, I am going to follow the discussions of the language issue in its various “incarnations” in several sources. My cultural evidence comes from a) documents, materials and statements of national movements and public groups in Belarus regarding the national language; b) published governmental documents; c) debates over national issues in the media since the end of the 1980s till present. I will largely draw from the information coming from public culture -- from television, radio, printed and electronic media -- because these debates over national identity and language take place in the public sphere. New electronic media, as well as other Internet sources (blogs, live-journal posts, or websites) have special significance in Belarus, where, due to the government censorship, some publications and even personal utterances can only be made in cyberspace. I will also rely on my own close observations of how people deal with and talk about the use of Belarusian or Russian, as they rationalize their choices. Taken together, such materials can be seen, after M. Foucault, as a discursive formation, or as ideological formations that operate through discursive regularities and that can be seen as both sites where social change occurs and the instruments of it. 5 My interest is not only in what is said about the language, but in how it is said: when, where and for whom, because it is in social life that linguistic exchanges realize power relations.

P. Bourdieau, explaining how the symbolic domination of languages is produced by the social structures which legitimize their usage, points out that the official language is bound up with the state in its genesis and social uses. It is created in the process of state formation and is imposed as the only legitimate one in the linguistic market, which, for this to happen, has to be unified, and “the different dialects (of class, region or ethnic group) have to be measured practically against the legitimate language or usage.”6 In social reality, which language or language variant is used and in what circumstances is related to the speakers’ position in the social structure. This general assumption about the inclusion of languages into social hierarchies can be broken further down to such issues as the social, and not only linguistic, nature of classifications into languages and dialects, as well as of their established genealogy: which language is believed to be more ancient in the normative version of national history can say more about who studies them and for what purpose, than about purely linguistic matters. Making a certain language variant the norm which then has to be studied and censored (by the “body of jurists”) entrusts it, and its speakers, with degrees of authority and special weight. The same is true for the language that power structures (whoever these might be) use and for the language of vertical social mobility. The prestige of the language is also coded into who studies whose languages, i.e. whether “migrants” study the language of the receiving community, or whether the reverse is the case (as it was in the USSR with the military families, who hardly ever studied the language of the national republic they lived in). Finally, issues of power are incorporated into which language becomes the name for the people and is used as the claim to the territory which they inhabit, and why and when these people look for political legitimating.

In daily social interactions power relations are manifested linguistically and speakers are always aware of the social value of variants, accents, pitches, dialects and other such things. The presence of these variations in linguistic interaction, and even simultaneous functioning of several languages in the same territory, does not, however, impede communication. People learn to interact and to understand each other, when there is a need, but such linguistic “equilibrium” exists only as long as everyone agrees with their linguistically manifested social statuses and takes them as natural. The accepted hierarchy of languages, though, is questioned and becomes an issue of “rights” during the periods of social change. This is so, because the language status marks the status of the group who declare themselves as its speakers, or of the people who speak in their name or on their behalf. If someone demands a change in the established hierarchy of languages, it means, that new people are ready to come into the corridors of power. This is what happened during the perestroika.

The language issue in the post-Soviet region cannot be discussed outside of the context of the immense social change, which called “languages,” as equaled to the names of peoples and territories, to the surface of public struggle. That is why I will describe briefly the reasons and nature of the social shift that started during the perestroika, based on the argument that I have already made elsewhere.7

Nations and Their Discontents
Perestroika awakened multiple social anxieties and launched, among other things, nationalist movements in the USSR. Ernest Gellner, for example, pointed out in the late 1980-s, that (Estonian) nationalists were also partisans of economic liberalism. Roman Szporluk, another distinguished scholar of (Ukrainian) nation-building, argued that the ideal of market economy was most strongly articulated "at the edges", where nation-building resumed, while adherence to the socialist administrative methods was characteristic of "the Soviet imperial center."8 Evidently, these scholars pinpointed the link, which exists between any nationalism and economic restructuring.

By nationalism, I mean sentiments and movements related to the position of groups which define themselves through national terms: perceived common history, origin, culture, destiny, language, national oppression, etc. At the end of the 1980s, in every country of East Central Europe or the former Soviet Union there was a package of issues which related socialism to imagined national injustice: Soviet occupation in the Baltics and Central Europe, absence of independent statehood and language controversies in Ukraine and Belarus, nostalgia for imperial greatness in Russia (lost great culture, devastated nature, uprooted peasantry, annihilated nobility), disputed territories in the Caucasus, exhaustion of natural resources in Kazakhstan, and Stalinist crimes against the peoples everywhere. On the basis of these concerns societies opted for national independence from “others” who “occupied,” “exhausted resources,” “hampered the use of national language,” “killed national poets,” “ruined national sacred places,” “used our territory as bases for their army,” etc. The point is not whether the injustice was “real” or “imagined”, but that at that particular time national issues, in their various incarnations, began to be perceived as important for “nationalities”—they were, as Katherine Verdery points out, the only organizational forms that were already present and had an institutional history.9

“National independence,” which was proclaimed as the goal by many of those movements, presupposed market economy. In fact, it served as the form through which legitimization of class formation (overt development of social inequalities that existed under state socialism into classes) happened. The nationalist discourse was (overtly) started during the perestroika by the self-conscious layer of educated specialists and, sometimes, communist nomenklatura, for whom the Soviet system of resource allocation had become too tight, as the power and resources (i.e. the social capital) they had were part of their status and not something they “owned”, and as such, insecure.

The substitution of the status-based stratification by the new property-based class needed a legitimating narrative of democratization, which, with time, was almost totally monopolized by nationalist arguments, as it could have its material basis in “nationalities,” and “independence” becoming a legitimate, “politically correct” way to argue for market economy. For example, Zyanon Paznyak, the founder (in 1988) of the nationalist Belarusian Popular Front argued in many of his speeches and writings, that the “destruction” of the institute of private property by the communists deprived individuals of freedom and autonomy; only by restoring propertied individuals can one make people truly free and independent. Paz’nyak also argued that Soviet national republics, dependent on and exploited by Russia, will have a chance of “fair economic relations” with each other and, most of all, with Russia (i.e. will not be “exploited’ by the Soviet Empire, but will sell what they produce for a fair price), when becoming? independent, sovereign states.10

The reason for change was in the urge for a different system of resource allocation (through market and not through policy, as under socialism), based on a different idea of social justice. The motive, however, had to be something with which people could identify. Nationalism became the cultural resource capable of motivating and actually mobilizing the masses; at the same time it provided a liberation of class with a legitimate – for equaled with democratization – form. Post-Soviet national projects justify the new social order by providing the emerging new class with a “noble national goal.” Intellectuals played a special role in this process, not necessarily benefitting from it (often the opposite happened), but producing nationalist discourses and arguing on behalf of the “rising class.”

As the only NIS country to seemingly “reject” independent nationhood by electing the “anti-national” president Alexander Lukashenka, who signed a not yet realized reunion with Russia into a common state, which started with the rejection of Belarusian as the only state language in 1995, Belarus seems to present a “unique” case of a “denationalized nation”.11 Some politicians, as well as prominent intellectuals, see the reason for denationalization or, as some would call it, “creolization,” in the specific contested transitional space between Europe and Russia that Belarus occupies, and in the Soviet experience that supposedly made the people forget their “true” national belonging. This point of view which was especially popular in the 1990s is yet to fade away.

I have argued elsewhere, that the Belarusian controversy, which throughout the 1990s seemed to be about overtly “national” issues (language, symbols, the version of national history), is really about socialism vs. capitalism, or administrative vs. market economy. Alexander Lukashenka built his policy and his popularity on the non-withdrawal of the state (and him personally, as a living “l’etat c’est moi”) from the control over resource allocation. He came to incarnate social justice, as “he” (according to the government media) paid pensions and allowances, forbade unemployment, and fixed the prices; he “preserved” free healthcare and a socialist welfare system. Having monopolized fatherly concern for the people, for many years he was able to save the centralized, repression-based system, which gave him extreme power through control over resource distribution.

For the proponents of the “European belonging” and economic restructuring for Belarus, that system looked Soviet, i.e. anti-market and anti-democratic. For those who voted for it, however--i.e. for the groups which had no realistic interests in the extremely competitive, cruel and “oligarchic” capitalism of the early 1990s-- it entailed social justice realized with the help of a policy opposed to the market. If the resistance to the economic system which in the 1990s had massively turned people into rural and urban poor, has taken the form of rejection of the “national” agenda, it is perhaps because the proponents of national independence, who militantly deified market forces and celebrated personal autonomy, free prices and competition, regarded them as universal values, while they in fact were not. The “anti-independence” and anti-Western initiatives of the president triggered protest, severely repressed throughout Lukashenka’s presidency, on the part of urban intellectuals, but were greeted by the older people, by agricultural and industrial workers, by the poor and “Easterners”, and by more women than men.

I see the Belarusian standoff, which at this point is much less about “national” issues, for these are quite formal attributes to it, as “class struggle” between the groups, which benefit (or think that they do) differently from the market or the administrative (policy-based) system. One part of the society, mostly younger professionals, entrepreneurs, city dwellers etc., people with contemporary economic, cultural or intellectual assets, is interested in changing the status quo and “joining Europe”. The other part, which grew along with the success of the president’s economic policy (often explained by the Russia’s cheap oil for Belarus), wants to preserve a socialist-type “welfare state”, i.e. the administrative method of resource allocation. Overtly, both discourses appeal to the “good of the nation,” its wellbeing and flourishing, though their producers view what’s “good” very differently. “Nationhood” becomes a symbol, which is used by the opposing parties to legitimize their own position, strategy, and the right to power: they compete for the right to define the meaning of the national symbol and – with this – the use of its legitimizing capacity.12

Thus, post-Soviet “national” discourses can be seen as emerging, in a complicated way, from class interests rather than national feeling. In Belarus, this class-based rivalry took a mostly “linguistic” form. For both sides the language issue was at one point the symbolic representation of their struggle and a tool for social mobilization. Russian is seen as the language of the Soviet past, but also of “social justice,” while Belarusian is represented as the language of independence and the brave new world. My further analysis of the social context of a concrete language proceeds from the assumption, described earlier in this text, that the relations between languages are of social nature and as such are about power.

Language Revival: a Future in the Past?
The peoples who populated the Belarusian-Lithuanian ethnic and linguistic area never spoke a unified language. In 1897 the government of the Russian Empire, trying to classify imperial subjects, chose the linguistic criterion of the “native tongue” to break them into scientifically defined positivist categories for the First National Census. It was found out that in the North-West Province (which included Belarusian territories) from seventy to ninety-five percent of those who named Belarusian as their native language lived in the countryside, while city and town dwellers used either Yiddish, or Russian, or Polish, depending on the area.13 The use of languages (or their local versions) was structured not only geographically, but also in relation to social class and religious belonging, and if one were to illustrate Ernest Gellner’s “Ruritania” as a territory with the elites speaking a recognized language of the metropolitan court, the church(s) using another one(s) for liturgy, multiple Jews within this Pale of Settlement wrapped in their despised daily jargon and at the same time cherishing the sacred tongue of their holy books (belonging to a different linguistic family), and peasantry confined to their vernacular speak,14 Belarusian-Lithuanian language territory could be the place. Within that ethnic and class mix, where everyone still understood everyone else, simple folk often called themselves “tuteishyja,” or “people from here,” and spoke what they called tuteishaya mova or “the language from here.” No one but them, though, considered it a language.

This exemplary Central European bowl of contested lands and peoples gave birth to several national cultural ideas: a Polish, a Lithuanian, a Belarusian and even, at least partially, a Jewish one. They emerged as a means of social empowerment, and their goals were defined as the freedom to use the people’s tongue(s) in institutions and be educated in it, to get recognition for national culture, to get rid of backwardness, illiteracy, poverty, and to join the project of modernity that other European nations had been enjoying. As in many other places within the Empire at that time, local teachers, ethnographers, historians, and linguists, many of whom later went into actual politics to become revolutionaries, ministers, and even presidents, sought to awaken the people(s), to give them a name, to tell them “who they are” and to make them “proud” of their language(s), their culture(s) and their great past(s).

It was only after WWI and the revolutions of 1917 that the peoples populating that territory were finally differentiated from one another and were told who they were and where they belonged; after WWII, that happened once again. Thus Belarusian (and also Lithuanian and Polish) “statehood”--as a republic within USSR--was achieved in 1921, after several years of fighting and negotiations among the Russian Provisional Government, the Soviet Government, nationalists, Germans who were occupying the lands, Poles that were advancing and retreating, and the Western powers that attempted to establish the “true” ethnographic frontiers in the region based on the right of people for self-determination, as it was proclaimed by both Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin.

The Canadian scholar David Marples argues that communists both built and destroyed the nation, having turned it into a developed territory with advanced industries and an educated population, but also having purged most of the intellectuals nurtured on the turn-of-the-century revival ideals 15 (including Bronislaw Taraszkiewicz), though in terms of numbers repressions were smaller than in Russia itself. Marples also points out that by creating a national republic with Belarusian as a state language (alongside with Russian, Polish and Yiddish before WWII), communists sharpened Belarusian sensitivity and a sense of national identity. It was “sharpened” even more during WWII, out of which Belarus came with the highest casualty rate in the world (every fourth person killed), and definitely for the post-war generations the immense common suffering became the historical “point of origin” and a common experience, which was shaped in the post-war collective memory as the Soviet, not “national,” struggle.

Thus, the Belarusian master historical narrative was based on Soviet patriotism and produced by the communist era elite and their historians. The one antagonistic to it emerged from anti-communist intellectuals, starting around early 1960s, but fully formed during the perestroika; in the post-Soviet age their work (research, book publishing, conferences) began to be supported by Western foundations. It was based on the idea to revive Belarusian’s great, but forgotten, European historical past. Both discourses appealed to the “nation.” Their producers, however, viewed the Belarusian national project very differently and their “connection” to the “national language” was also different.

The Soviet discourse had little need for “national language” per se. It did, however, claim credit for having created the Belarusian socialist culture through the state’s support of book publishing, media, schools and the Academy of Sciences. In general, Soviet Byelorussia was seen as a success-story of socialism: industrialized, rather well-off, and a good place to live--military retirees from all over USSR often choosing it as a place to retire in. By the 1980s Belarusian schools remained only in the countryside, as Russian was considered the more prestigious language: urbanites and elites in general were more interested in their children’s fluency in Russian and English. A former official at the Ministry of Education told me how in the 1960s she came to a small town to inspect its two schools. The Russian one occupied a new building, had much better equipment and the children of all “important people” among its students. The Belarusian one was situated in an old cottage, was ill-equipped, and had mostly the children of villagers for students. Those children, though, were the main readers of the Belarusian textbooks, created for the first time under the Soviet regime in all school subjects.

The opposing discourse of Belarusian independence, which started among the literati, focused on collecting Belarusian folklore, restoring historical buildings and reviving “real”, not Soviet, Belarusian culture, began to be voiced publicly during the perestroika. Its key idea was a “return to Europe,” and as far as language was seen as the basis of the nation, it was a belated copy of German nationalist romanticism. It viewed the nation as a sacred and mystical unity, the meaning of which was beyond us, but which, like God, was “everywhere.” One of the prominent ideologists of the time argued that “the national idea is the mission, the fate, the meaning of the people’s existence. The recognition of this absolutely superior fate, given by God, the understanding of one’s uniqueness, one’s mission at this very land and at this time makes our national idea.”16 The nation’s “maturity,” another one believed, would inevitably yield a nation-state: “every adult (daroslaya) nation should flourish in its own state.” 17 The original German linguistic nationalism was largely based in the anti-French feeling during Napoleonic wars; in a similar way during the anti-communist perestroika in Belarus, the language was turned into the symbol of an independent nation: its revival was equaled to the revival of the nation, which, ideally, was seen as a sovereign state. The head of the Popular Front argued that “The main pillars, in terms of their moral value, of all national movements in Eastern and Central Europe were the national language and the nation-state. 18

The revival of the language and the creation of a new society on its base implied the future based on the values of the past. Patriotic intellectuals declared the focus of the Belarusian project to be in “language, village, Vil’nya.” 19 In that triad, the language symbolized the awakening nation, the “village” was the place where it supposedly flourished and where the folk were just waiting to be awakened and led by the national prophets and Vilnya (contemporary Vilnius) stood for the golden past. The first “Nasha nova” was published there in the early 19- hundred.

But real people in the Belarusian (or any other) territories never spoke the imagined canonical language. According to Gellner, such canons are a project of modernity, created alongside with state formation and controlled by the body of jurists, as P. Bourdieau calls various literati. “Restoring” the language largely means reinventing it, and in such national projects not the “people’s,” but the invented or the restored literary language (related to the local dialects, but not identical with them) becomes the state one. The goal of intellectuals in such restorations is not of a completely disinterested nature. Since the mid-1960s, when urbanization and modernization became too evident, an anxiety that “mova hine” (the Belarusian language is dying), has been growing among intellectuals. In 1987 a group of Belarusian writers and artists authored a letter to M. Gorbachev. It was conceived from concern over the state of the language and, evidently, also over their own status as national intelligentsia. Vassil’ Bykau, the honored writer of WWII experience and the laureate of the Lenin Prize in Literature (the highest Soviet honor), whose books were translated into dozens of languages worldwide, was indignant, because:

“One would hardly find anywhere the writers, who work in a linguistic vacuum, where one cannot hear a Belarusian word, and where the native language is preserved as a rudiment […] But Belarusian writers, working in this situation, do write: they write novels and poems, lyrics and epics, and all of these in the native Belarusian language.”20

The paradox was that the books by the members of the Byelorussian Writers’ Union were published with state support of national culture in dozens of thousands of copies, i.e., in numbers that became unthinkable in the post-Soviet market; the writers were entitled to all kinds of benefits (spacious apartments, cars, dachas, international travel covered by the state, and similar perks). At the same time, those books often remained on the store shelves for years and then went into recycling, and the writers believed that the “socialist state” was to blame for the lack of interest. In his talk with Vassyl Bykau, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus, bewildered by the public attacks on the language policy, remarked that the poet Nil Gilevich published ten books of verse in two years (in a state publishing house), to which Bykau replied that the poet wrote and was published 21 (and paid): What could be more natural? Thus the literati saw their role in preserving what they believed was “the people’s tongue,” in which real people were not interested.

In 1988 the archeologist Zyanon Paznyak, who got a name for discovering and publicizing “Kurapaty” (near Minsk where Stalin’s shootings took place in 1937-1939) as a site of national grief,22 and the founder of the nationalist Popular Front, published an essay in the “Raduga” Estonian youth magazine, where for the first time the term linguocide was used. The Soviet language policy was equaled to the extermination of the people, and thus the issues of the language and Stalinist crimes became linked in public consciousness. The society was agitated, as since that point in time, one’s attitude to the Belarusian language was taken as a symbolic expression of one’s position as regards Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet past in general. The language became the symbol of revolt against the Soviet regime, and, as the main justification of independence (“language” equaling “nation”). It also became a Western-type democracy issue.

The language question concerned everyone who made a living through intellectual work in a different way as well. In his book about the revival of Hebrew Benjamin Harshav introduces the concept of a “base language” of the society and the individual: the one that provides a foundation for the individual’s language activities, and which serves as a basis for oral and written informational networks.23 And if Belarusian was not the base language in the Belarusian Soviet society, if it was not the language of a modern polity, of science, of law, of industry, of social exchanges, the oral language of daily interactions and the written language of all types of activities, and the individual language of human self-reflection, except for a small group – could it then be used to express contemporary sensibilities? The philosopher Ihar Babkou points out in one of his essays that Belarusian Soviet literature used the language that did not exist to write about the reality that did not exist either,24 and many regarded Belarusian as an outdated, backward and retarded language of the “social province.”

Could the language be revived, if this was for a cause? At least some people thought so. Young urbanites began switching to Belarusian in their daily interactions in the hope of paving the way for a modern life in the ancient language. This act, which demands remarkable will, self-discipline, and identification with a clear political goal, lasted with some of them for several weeks, and with some for several years, while others became Belarusian-speaking for life. A friend of mine recently switched back to Russian after seven years of living in Belarusian, disenchanted because “nothing changes, really.” Evidently, not the language per se, but the social change with which the switch was identified, had been a deeper reason for his act.

Seen as an issue of democracy and used as an instrument for social mobilization, Belarusian was not about giving a voice to the “subalterns,” as had been the case in the 1920s, when villagers (both women and men, for the first time) were provided with an opportunity to learn to read, write, and express themselves in their “tuteishaya mova,” rather, it was a tool for squeezing communists out of power and introducing a different elite recruitment model. “The language” served as an anticommunist symbol and a marker of political belonging for the urbanites, who did not really speak it, but were interested in social change. According to the editor-in-chief of “Svaboda”:

«At that time I published “Svaboda” completely in Belarusian, and even using “taraszkewitsa (non-Soviet orthography – E.G.), and the circulation was tens of thousands. That was in the early 1990s, and the attitude to the Belarusian language was very positive”25

Inspired by perestroika, some newspapers introduced a special “prestige of the native tongue” column to discuss language matters. If a journalist asked a promoter of the linguistic change, “why is it necessary to make Belarusian the state language?” the reply was “to give it back some of the prestige,”26 which, sociologically, implies making it the language of the elites. Some linguists would say, almost as a quote from the German romantic nationalist Gerder, to rescue it from extinction, for this is about global cultural diversity. I studied the main newspapers of the period, and the response “to let the subaltern speak,” to give the voice to those, mostly villagers, who supposedly were the repository of the ancient language, culture, and nationhood, did not come up. By that time, the imagined community of rural folk changed drastically: having lived through Soviet modernization, they sent their kids to universities, watched TV, did not weave any home-made textiles and spoke differently than they were supposed to. They had to be “taught to speak their native tongue” (what they spoke could not be native), and national intellectuals saw their mission in this sacred teaching, which would accumulate for them more social capital.

As the newspapers began publishing letters of support for the “return of the native language,” letter after letter flowed in, now signed by a “teacher”, now by an “ethnographer,” now by a “linguist,” each citing examples of how Belarusian citizens faced difficulties in sending their kids to Belarusian schools, mostly, according to the letters, because other parents, also Belarusian citizens, objected to switching their children’s schooling to Belarusian. In the eyes of the new democrats everyone who spoke against the native language was branded as “Soviet” or even “Russian imperialist.”

Parents in general, however, were neither linguists nor ethnographers and thus lacked an interest in the “rural language.” To them the language that mattered was the language of the upward social mobility, and that was Russian. Those who had left the countryside in the cycle of urban migration and ended up being truck drivers, or plumbers, or low-level Communist party functionaries, had their resources based in the Soviet system. Many retained some of their rural speech, which was very different from the literary Belarusian, and they did not acquire the standard Russian of the educated urbanites. They spoke, and still speak, trasyanka, a social-code phenomenon similar to that of Ukrainian surzhyk-- variably described as a mixture of Belarusian and Russian, 27 or as a “Russified variant of the national language.”28 According to the St. Petersburg linguist Nikolay Vakhtin argues (the word to be deleted), however, trasyanka is not about mixing languages, but about violating their norms29 -- i.e., the norms of both Belarusian and Russian. Viewed as a marker of plebian, vulgar, and lowly belonging, of rural backwardness, trasyanka has by and large been a target of contempt and ridicule. 30

Since the early 2000s, though, two standup comedians Sasha and Sirozha have been using trasyanka as the language of their shows, for this allegedly barbarous and illegitimate “patois” gives expression to a recognized social experience. The upgrading of this “newspeak” to some legitimacy was prepared by the fact that Alexandar Lukashenka, a countryside dweller, spoke the easily recognizable trasyanka of a minor bureaucrat of rural descent, when he was first elected the president in 1994, and people immediately recognized him as “one of our own,” and the Government media began calling him “the people’s president.” Not so the intelligentsia, both Russian and Belarusian-speaking, who felt terrified not just by his political program of “reviving” the USSR, but also by the way he sounded. To them his trasyanka speech patterns violated the norms of “proper” language practices.

Elsewhere in the former USSR perestroika paved the way to state power for the new intellectual/technocratic “class,” whose speech revealed their educated urban background of the children of Soviet intelligentsia or nomenklatura. A university professor from Minsk remarked in a private conversation at the time, that she was ashamed of how Belarus was going to look in front of the international community with a president that spoke the way he did.

Soon after Lukashenka was elected, WWII veterans paid several visits to him with a request to switch their grandchildren’s schools back to the Russian language of instruction.31 The schools had been “Belarusified” after 1991, and in the 1993/94 academic year 76% of first-graders started their schooling in Belarusian,31 i.e. in the language that was not spoken in their families. The parents were concerned about the opportunities which Russian as a “world language” provided while the veterans also stood up to say that they had not lived their lives in vain: they had tried to defend the very way of life that Lukashenka was trying to revive. By 2006 the number of first-graders who studied in Belarusian dropped to 18%, with 2,2% (of all first-graders) in the capital city.32 In 1991, though, there were none.

Since 1991, Belarusian had been the only state language, and in 1995 the President initiated – and won in a landslide – the Referendum on the state language and state symbols, which made Belarusian and Russian the languages of equal status. In fact, that has largely meant “squeezing” Belarusian out of the public sphere. Overtly, the referendum asked what the citizens wanted to see as their flag and the coat of arms and the language; everyone understood, though, that the real issue was the attitude to the Soviet past and the stand-off between the “nationalist” parliament and the “people’s president.” On the evening before, state TV screened the propaganda documentary “The Children of Lie,” in which “nationalists” were shown to be the followers of fascist collaborators (during WWII the German administration supported, on a limited basis, Belarusian nationalist organizations). For many in the nation with the highest WWII casualty rate voting for “their” flag and “their” language became impossible on ethical grounds. Approximately at that time the journalist Yury Drakahrust used in one of his articles the term “Belarusian nationalism in the Russian language” (russkoyazychnyi belorusskii nationalism) to give a name to the groups, who, while standing for political independence, economic liberalism and a pro-Western orientation, did not identify with the language and other traditional values as the symbols of democratization.

Trasyanka is qualified as a pidgin33 (though pidgins result from a different social and linguistic process) by some intellectuals, who theorize Soviet rule as colonialism, and contemporary Belarus as a postcolonial nation.34 For them, this is a sign of violence over the language which results from the physical violence against people: “trasyanka is the Soviet monster that began to jump out of Belarusian bodies destroyed and ragged by Soviet experiments.”35 According to this paradigm, Russian is the imposed language of the colonizers (similar to what French was in Algeria) and those who speak it (i.e. most of the Belarusian population) are a “creolized” community with a false consciousness and thus not part of the real Belarusian nation. Only by switching to Belarusian can the nation recover from the wounds of history and achieve prosperity and a European standard of life:

Every person who speaks Belarusian in his daily life helps create independence for our nation and invests into its prosperity and wellbeing. Let’s defend our native tongue together! This is what Vladimir Karatkevich [Belarussian national writer – E.G.] urged us to do: “The grandchildren of the great Skaryna [Skaryna printed the first Belarusian books in the 16th century-E.G.]! Where is your pride, power and beauty? You have your sacred thing, too. Do not give it away to the dogs!”36

This rhetoric is meant to prove the “worth” of the language to those outside the circle of the converted, and the defenders of the language try to “sell it,” quite seriously, for the economic benefits its introduction might bring. When in 2007 the Russian Federation raised oil prices for Belarus to the “world market level,” and the government cut social benefits to cover the costs, a “Nasha niva” journalist suggested for the government, not exactly as a joke, to convert the language into real currency, by passing a regulation that all DVDs and software sold in the Republic should include Belarusian subtitles as an option:

Can you imagine how much more money our government could get this way? The translations [into Belarusian] would be made in the government institutions, as the most knowledgeable of the language […] With this money we would cover the oil costs easily.”37

When discussing this suggestion in a blog, a political scientist who teaches at a technical university, remarked:

The European Union supports the languages of national minorities as cultural values. Is Belarusian worse than those? As for its “cost”: a national language as a cultural specificity is a real “marketing brand,” similar to Chinese hieroglyphs, African cultural sculptures, or the underground movies by the New York lesbians. Uniqueness sells well […] This, if you like, is a long-term investment into a unique trade brand, which will not bring money too soon. But it will, in the same way as fundamental research does, for example.”38

The real “worth” of the language, however, is in the power of the groups who promote it as their symbol or the equivalent of their status. Thus, while the government, having monopolized the “welfare” rhetoric, promotes the “biased bilingualism” (the term by the Belarusian scholar Boris Norman), which unambiguously favors Russian, the intellectual Belarusian-speaking elites revert, with a purpose, to the discourse of colonization, occupation, and even national oppression: “During Soviet times book publishing was controlled by the colonial administration.”39

Colonial oppression is not easy to prove and the “Russians, go home!” posters, when these appear, inspire nothing but rejection in the nation where the “colonizers” and the “colonized” studied in the same schools, worked together, ate the same food, lived in the same housing projects, married each other and had kids and could not care less for the ethnicity registered in one’s passport (unless one was Jewish, which sometimes mattered). “Coercion” into the Russian language had been there, of course, but, having the institutionalized form of the daily organization of power and leaving little other way but to speak Russian, it looked like an independent choice one made in favor of the more developed language. Yet the narrative of colonization and national oppression can easily be tied to the concept of human rights and their violation:

The Russian language is an aggressive tool of the Russian chauvinist fascism. The Russian language is the evil tongue of captivity. Belarusians, switch over to your mother tongue. By doing this, you will get rid of the negative effect of the Russian language on our human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy. In this way we shall bring closer the reign of freedom in Belarus.40

References to human rights, democracy and European values have their locus of power in the “international community”, “European Union,” or “human rights organizations,” which become the force behind the internationally recognized political language that the opposition resorts to, especially as they are the ones who support the opposition financially. Tatiana Zhurzhenko mentions a similar type of empowerment through “democratic and human rights rhetoric”, this time of the Russian speakers, in Ukraine41, where they claim the violation of the Constitution by the government, if they are not given the opportunity to speak in the language they wish to speak.

But the struggle for defining the democracy symbol appears to be essentially a struggle for political power:

The first thing we are going to do, when we get power – we shall change the artificial, false red-and-green state symbols for the national white-red-white flag and the coat of arms.42

Initially, as the opposition believed that finding a common language with the people was a matter of using the right words or rhetorical figures, the deputy-chairman of the Popular Front suggesting various tactics of linguistic persuasion: «One more step could be the change of the political rhetoric and vocabulary. For example, one can say “progressive” media, instead of “independent” (oppositional) media.43

In time, however, as “the people” kept voting for Lukashenka and failed to happily embrace the new language opportunities that were offered to them, the old model of national “oppression and resistance” proved useless. The one in the making is based on contempt for “the people” who are seen as the lowly and vulgar sovki (Soviet people), the “zombied electorate”44 (i.e. devoid of the capacity of reflection and analysis), the “social province,”45 irrational “lumpens,46 plebeians and primitives,47 and “crazy babushkas,”48-- generally passive and not capable of active and responsible behavior,49 driven by the lowly interests. Intellectuals distance themselves from the people by producing “class difference,” without directly applying the notions of economic inequality, but using the power of discourse and converting their cultural capital into power.

Thus Belarusian-speaking intellectuals remain the only “stable” group defending the Belarusian language and speaking it “for a reason”, if not always naturally, with other groups joining in either occasionally (for a reason, when the situation requires it), or for a period of time. This situation results from a certain language politics,50 but it would be pointless to ask whether the 20th century modernization could have happened differently. At this point it is of lesser importance whether the language and culture were “stolen” from the people, than who is going to benefit from their “reintroduction.”

Belarusian as an Intellectual Commodity

My discussion of language as a “commodity,” from which some can “benefit,” is based on the assumption, extensively theorized by P. Bourdieau, that (a) language is a part of the symbolic market: the participants in this market constantly exchange their capitals and negotiate their statuses and access to power, by “playing” with languages or language variants. My real question then is why is it primarily the humanities intellectuals (and to a much lesser extent technical intelligentsia or educated professionals) who “need” Belarusian, if those on whose behalf they speak in the post-Soviet region, quite often reject it. The editor of “Nasha niva” asserted, with undeniable pride, that Belarusian has become the language of the counter-elites:

“Belarusian is not a village language any more, not the language of a collective farm and state radio. This is the language of youth, the language of bohemia, of protest, of pro-Western orientation, of non-conformism, of punk, of challenge. It remains a minority thing in the life of an average Belarusian, but it still has a strong political message.”51

Though as a symbol of a liberal social and political system the language is about political power, this is not the personal goal of many literati, journalists and artists: they do not dream of being presidents or ministers, but of remaining who they are, and some of them are very critical of the outdated nationalist mythology on which much of the pro-Belarusian rhetoric is built.52 What, then, is the intellectuals’ interest in the national language?

The interest is based in the very specific relationship that intellectuals have with the language in general; for them it is the instrument with which they constitute themselves as social subjects and actors. The post-Soviet reconfiguration of the world reshaped this agency in at least two significant ways.

The first way concerns the statuses of what was seen as local or minority languages in the USSR: many of them became “national” or state languages, which implies a rethinking of their relationship to the “world languages” and of the social position and identities of their speakers.

Secondly, post-Soviet intellectuals became the players in the global and regional symbolic markets, which was unthinkable when they lived behind the iron curtain. The symbolic markets, though, are not completely symbolic: in fact, they are quite “material” via their connection to capitals.

These capitals can be of two kinds. On the one hand, absolutely real financial capitals are needed to shoot movies, publish translations of foreign philosophy or show an Oscar ceremony: sometimes, even national TV channels belonging to smaller nations can’t afford such screenings; quite often national academies cannot support translating and publishing even major contemporary works in the humanities, for their academic markets are too small. These material capitals are related, in complicated ways, to symbolic capitals per se--one’s visibility as a global (or regional) author, one’s recognition through multiple publications in many languages, the inclusion of one’s works into the reading lists for students is influenced by the structure of the global symbolic field. This structure builds around academia, around the publishing and media industry, the statuses of the languages in which the work is written, and even around the question whether the author comes from the nation which has nuclear weapons or is a home for the Al Qaeda militants.

Because of the structure of symbolic markets, the “resources” of intellectuals coming from bigger and smaller cultures are not equal, and works published in obscure languages have fewer chances to become known to the global public, irrespective of their intellectual worth. The recent trend in Slavic studies is to code the Soviet social and cultural events as “Russian”: books titled “The history of… in the 20th century Russia” have become the norm. They represent Soviet experience as Russian, and this is “socially acceptable” because of the huge place that Russia occupies symbolically and politically. Belarusian experience cannot be represented as “the Soviet,” but only as Belarusian, or as “Soviet Belarusian” at best, which immediately confines it to the narrow corner of those interested in the “local languages and cultures.” This is bad news for local intellectuals, whose resources are thus dwarfed even more, while intellectuals by their very nature are interested in being heard by bigger audiences, potentially, by the whole world. The good news is there might be extra resources that intellectuals might use to increase their visibility, and the language is one of them.

In what follows I am going to demonstrate how a national language can be an instrument in the world of symbolic capitals.

The American journalist Anne Applebaum in her travel book “Between East and West” mentions a young man, a philosopher, poet and student of English whom she met in Minsk in 1991. Immersed in the study of postmodernism and Beatnik texts, he explained his credo:

We young Belarusians can be like gods—we can create the world by inventing
new words for things. Where else in the world can I do the first translations of
Derrida, or write the definitive work on Hegel? Here I can help create a
literary tradition, and influence the thinking of the many generations of people
who will follow me.53


Applebaum mentions that one of his friends had translated Ulysses into Belarusian, just to see whether it could be done; another one was working on Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and everyone in that milieu was learning Belarusian. Today the nation can boast excellent translations of some important literary texts, all of which were done by intellectual enthusiasts similar to the above mentioned young man, who built their new careers around the “Belarusian cultural cause.” All of these translations were published with the support of Western foundations, which tried to contribute to the democracy cause in the best way they could think of. In 2005, 421 titles (books) were published in Belarusian and only 92 of them by the state publishing houses.54

The young pathos of the post-perestroika was based in the patriotic enthusiasm, which had its roots in the new opportunities that the brave new world was unleashing for the local elites: in the inspirational project of (re)creating a post-communist nation-state as an epitome of a new type of agency and polity, in the opportunity to cross national borders freely (well, not exactly, as we know now, but didn’t know then), in a sense of joining avant-garde developments in the international humanities, in becoming ambitious participants in a new European and world order.

In the early 1990s in the former socialist region the language issue became “big politics,” as the decentralization created new, unheard of opportunities for the local elites. Western nations opened their embassies and Western foundations were opening their offices in such previously obscure places as Almaty, Tbilisi, and Minsk, which became the capitals of independent nations. They were looking both for personnel and experts, whose opinion they could trust in deciding what political and cultural projects were worthy of support, as well as for the people who could be seen as “the agents of change.” 55 The “West” was eager to finance what was seen as democratic initiatives, and what, it seemed, could be more democratic than national language and culture projects, for hadn’t the USSR been a prison of nations? Haven’t the people earned the right to speak the language that had been denied to them by the communist internationalists? As the American Embassy was opened in Minsk in 1992, the person who answered the phone and accepted papers to get a visa spoke two languages: Belarusian and English. Even when the visitors spoke Russian, as was most often the case, they were invariably answered or interviewed in Belarusian, or English.
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The words ‘grant’ and ‘scholarship’ were entering the academic vocabulary: one could get money to travel to a conference or to organize one, to start a cultural project and even to publish one’s own literary texts, preferably, if these were in Belarusian. Reinventing themselves through “anti-colonial nationalism” as a new breed, “public intellectuals” (who “did not exist” in the USSR, in spite of the abundance of intellectual conversations over kitchen tables) launched several journals, two of which, ARCHE and Frahmenty, declared postcolonial studies the intellectual paradigm that enabled a new analysis of local culture, created “Belaruski Kalegium” to offer courses on topics in the “new humanities,” and embarked on various cultural projects, almost all with foreign support and in an absolutely new cultural situation.

Cultural and intellectual life around Belarusian initiatives was rich and diverse, it provided intimacy, identity and solidarity; it created the sense of belonging with a sacred cause and, at the same time, the previously unthinkable opportunities for social mobility and for becoming players in the new symbolic markets. As the “new Europe” of post-socialist nations across the Belarusian-Polish border was shaped into existence, the Russian cultural market, devastated in the 1990s, became strong again, with dozens of new publishing houses, independent TV-channels, theatrical initiatives, movie and music festivals financed with the money that the market capitalism may provide. For a Belarusian intellectual to assert a meaningful and separate presence in cultural space dominated by Russia, where Russian publishers are the ones with the resources to translate and publish Derrida – or Steven King - and where Russian, and not local, TV can afford to broadcast an Oscar ceremony, is a task which proves too difficult. A Belarusian intellectual, who may be Russian-speaking, is forever marginal in the “Russian” cultural world. Devoid of the cultural resources to “confront” the Russian cultural and civilization narrative, shaped through the grand imperial tradition, s/he is almost always taken as a village cousin who can never speak correctly and, even if s/he does, whose topics are too local, whose concerns too ethnically narrow, etc. A Belarusian-speaking intellectual may have no place in that space at all. According to A. Wilson, post-Soviet Russian historiography “has so far failed to address seriously the fact of Ukrainian and Belarusian independence,”56 and this is true for the general intellectual context in the region.

The one way for “local” intellectuals to contest the grand narrative in the region is to reinvent themselves as “totally different,” or foreign, by entering the “opposite,” (Central) European symbolic market. This can only be done in the “national language” as the basis for cultural nationhood in Central Europe, which is not seen as “an uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and Germany” (which it was according to Milan Kundera57) any more, but as a “new Europe,” a space which is currently not organized through a binary opposition to the former metropolis, but is, potentially, a multiplicity of intellectual centers ready and willing to accept new members into its realm. The “profit” one gets in this way results from the objective relations of power among languages58 in the space where the dominant language (aside from English) is currently missing.

(Mostly) Slavic Central Europe became a venue for Belarusian rock-bands (Belarusian rock-festival “Basovishcha” takes place in Poland on a yearly basis), a destination point for Belarusian journalists and artists and even academics, and a translation opportunity for Belarusian writers and poets. Acceptance there lends prestige and provides intellectual visibility in an “almost European” symbolic market. No wonder then that as the debates over national orthography began to unleash after 2000, the opposition between its two Cyrillic variants, the narkomovka and the taraszkewitsa, began to be presented as the issue of European belonging.


Narkomovka is the orthography variant first codified in 1933. It is believed to be “Russified” and created with the idea to strengthen symbolically the closeness of Belarusian and Russian. Though this is the orthography that the nation used for most of the 20th century, many linguists believe that it does not “transcribe” Belarusian phonetics. The most problematic issue is the use of Ь (“myahki znak”) after certain consonants, which narkomovka does not allow. Taraszkewitsa, on the other hand, provides for the Ь in the right places, but its public use was forbidden by the government ruling, when trasyanka-speaking authorities became alerted by the orthography in the oppositional newspapers.

When, about ten years ago, a group of linguists headed by the contemporary chairman of the Popular Front Vintsuk Vyachorka started a project on “normalizing the orthography” (i.e. modernizing Taraszkewitsa), it was called “the struggle for Ь (myhki zbak),” which is presented as the symbol of national tenacity and iron will, similar to the special cross sign of the 17th century Old Believers. The US-based Belarusian bard Syarzhuk Sokalau-Voyush wrote a poem about the letter,59 a kind of requiem after Bronislaw Taraszkewicz and other “bourgeois nationalists” of the turn of the century.

“The Rules of Belarusian Classical Orthography”60 were finally published by the working group in 2005. Since then “negotiations” have been going on over their introduction into use. The government ignores them in the same way as it ignores the opposition, and in 2007 it initiated the bill “On the rules of Belarusian orthography and punctuation,” based on the narkomovka. At the same time opposition publishes its newspapers and journals in this orthography, seeing it as a manifestation of a Central-European belonging:

An adherent of Taraszkewitza, if an adequate Belarusian word is missing, will hardly pronounce a Russian one in a Belarusian way, but will rather use a Polish or a Czech analogy.61

This desire of (Central) European belonging and cultural citizenship, expressed in and realized with the publications in the Belarusian language and classical orthography, as well as by other cultural initiatives, is made possible, however, only with Western support: without Western financing none of these projects would exist. Thus, Belarusian intellectuals become involved in social processes they cannot escape, where they barely represent their own selves, but speak “for someone else” in the language they believe to be the symbol of freedom.

Concluding Remarks

In his paper on Soviet dissidents the anthropologist Serguei Oushakin writes that their “initiative” was “taken over” by the communists, when Gorbachev started the perestroika and began using their language of human rights and rule of law, but that using the dissident language is not the same thing as filling the government with dissidents.62 In 2006 the Belarusian president recognized

“We support Belarusian, when it is needed, but we do not see it as our goal to promote it to such an extent that the people would forget Russian […] If this happens, we are going to lose one half of what we have intellectually, all mathematics and engineering.”63

He also passed a ruling pertaining that 75% of all music on Belarusian radio is to be Belarusian music, and declared in one of his speeches that saving Belarusian is important, but need not be too radical: “The language is not a card in politics […] but I personally think that if you do not know the Belarusian language, do not understand it, cannot speak it, cannot write it, you are not Belarusian.”64


At the same time some Belarusian “dissidents” won several law suits against the government concerning the use of Belarusian. In one of them a Belarusian-speaking citizen and a member of an oppositional organization refused to fill in customs declarations in Russian, claiming that he did not know the language well enough (which is impossible) and could make mistakes, which could have grave results for him. The customs office did not have Belarusian forms, and the person went to court. Unexpectedly, the court ruled that, as Belarusian was one of the two state languages, such declarations were supposed to be provided. The court ruling was celebrated as a victory, however small, in the struggle for the language. It could be a victory, if not for simultaneous arrests of members of the opposition, quite often, for lack of any other reasons, on the pretext of allegedly “dirty-cursing” (using four-letter words) in public places. Alexander Feduta, a famous journalist and the author of the Lukashenka’s political biography (referred to in this text) remarked in his blog that for many, defending the Belarusian language, the fact of its use on the customs declarations seems to be more important than democracy itself. 65

1. Woolhiser, Kurt. Language and Ideology and Language Conflist in Post-Soviet Belarus. //Language, Ethnicity and the State: Minority Languages in Eastern-Europe Post-1989. Ed. Camille O'Reilly. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Zaprudski, Siarhiej. In the grop of replacive bilingualism: the Belarusiab language in contact with Russian." //International Journal of the Sociology of Language, January 2007, issue 183.
2. Currently Nasha Niva has a circulation of 3000. One needs to keep in mind, however, that independetn media in Belarus is subjected to all sorts of obstacles, including persectuin, by the government.
3. Mova yak ahvyara palityki//Nasha niva. 2001. May 29. P. 3-8.

Thanks. A very interesting paper.

I would translate "daroslaya" as "mature", rather than "adult".

Edited at 2008-12-18 10:19 pm (UTC)

http://hukivakol.livejournal.com/55893.html

мне вот тут кинули ссылку на наталку бабину -- там аудио файлы чтения

могли бы вы показать список источников, на которые ссылаетесь?
спасибо

сейчас попытаюсь запостить. у меня что-то глюкнуло - и они не видны (как бы исчезли - при наводке мыши ничего не раскрывается. попробую исправить).

это невероятно, но у меня глюкнулись все ссылки. я дожна их заново набирать вручную с печатного варианта!

не стоит портить себе праздники, я переживу )))

An interesting piece, although at times it reads like a hasty compilation. Also I was quite surprised by the logic of some examples – e.g. "The court ruling was celebrated as a victory, however small, in the struggle for the language. It could be a victory, if not for simultaneous arrests of members of the opposition…"

Why so? By this logic one can write in exactly the same words about an imaginary court ruling in support of some ecological initiative or striking factory workers – e.g. "The court ruling was celebrated as a victory, however small, in the struggle for ecology. It could be a victory, if not for simultaneous arrests of members of the opposition, etc". And the pretext of "dirty-cursing" for the arrests doesn't change anything in this context, no more than the pretext of pissing in a public place would make irrelevant some court ruling in support of sexual minorities.

The text also could have benefited from some more fact-checking – e.g. Viachorka is not the chairman of the BPF since December 2007; the "75 percent ruling" for FM radio, which you cite as an example of Lukashenka's support for the Belarusian, in fact has nothing to do with language. It requires 75 percent of the songs to relate to Belarusian performers, and the vast majority of this quota is in Russian and some of it in English. The names throughout the text are rendered inconsistently, and where did you get the "ss" from in Vassil' and Vassyl Bykau on the same page? :) But I guess I'm too critical here because it's not the final edited version for the book, is it?

Would love to debate on the main points of the text if we meet some time ;)

Exactly. Что и требовалось доказать: вместо "языка" можно подставить экологию или что угодно. Т.е. от смены языка (русского не белорусский) демократия не появляется, и борьба за язык может быть борьбой за демократию, а может и не быть. Язык - только символ чего-то другого.

Але чаму тады арышты павінны замінаць сьвяткаваць "a victory, however small, in the struggle for the language"? Беларуская мова ня ёсьць манаполіяй дэмакратычнай апазыцыі. Ёй карыстаюцца (і вызнаюць за каштоўнасьць саму па сабе) і анархісты, і крайняя правіца, для якіх лібэральная дэмакратыя каштоўнасьцю ня ёсьць. А Таварыства беларускай мовы апошнія гады намагаецца палітыкі ўвогуле пазьбягаць і супрацоўнічаць з уладай. Тое, што ў свой час зьявілася гэтая зьвязка "мова-дэмакратыя" -- у большай ступені праца ўлады, чым асобных апазыцыйных інтэлектуалаў.

Барацьба супраць будаваньня хімзавода таксама можа быць барацьбой за дэмакратыю, а можа ня быць. Але гэта не абавязкова значыць, што экалёгія тут -- "только символ чего-то другого".

Таму што дэмакратычная апазыцыя змагаецца за ўладу, робячы выгляд, што гэта барацьба за дэмакратыю.

Вы свмі сабе супярэчыце сваім другім пуктам.

Прабачце, якім другім пунктам і дзе тут супярэчнасьць?

"Вы самі сабе супярэчыце сваім другім пуктам"
А калі так:"супярэчыў сам сабе сваім пятым пунктам".
Дарэчы,а які быў другі пункт?

Edited at 2014-08-24 05:15 pm (UTC)

Пра что (пра якія "пункты") вы гаворыце?

Як Вы адразу не здагадаліся, то й тлумачыць няма чаго.

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