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Thread: Why Belarusians don't speak their own language?

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    Veteran Member Veneda's Avatar
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    Default Why Belarusians don't speak their own language?

    Why don't Belarusians speak Belarusian? Why is it that most Belarusians speak Russian instead of Belarusian? Is there a chance that after decades of Russian dominance Belarus begins to reclaim her language?



    Sources http://focus.solidarityby.eu/page_it...eak_in_german_
    http://wiadomosci.wp.pl/title,To-tak...5586&_ticrsn=3

    It’s like Poles would speak in German

    “Poles are not geese and have their own language” – as Mikolaj Rej, the first person in history to write only in Polish, once said. In this sense, we Belarusians can be called geese. Though we have our own language, we don’t use it.

    - How is it possible that Belarusians don’t speak Belarusian? – asked an astonished fellow student from a Polish university I had studied at. – It’s like Poles would speak in German!

    Exactly: how is it possible? – I asked myself then.

    “Language-killer”

    Belarus is the most Russified republic of the former USSR. In any other corner of the great empire, the Russian language hasn’t left such a significant stigma.

    - The Russian language, like English in other places, was the classical “language-killer” to smaller languages of the empire, – linguist Źmicier Sauka tells me. – The rest of the languages in the USSR were exotic and served as decorations. As in Hawaii we can still find names of hotels, streets and even drinks in the language of indigenous inhabitants of these islands. But it doesn’t mean that the Hawaiian language is used or has any future, - the linguist adds.

    Language of the countryside

    The presence of the Russian language on Belarusian territory goes back as far as the times of Tsarist Russia. However, it obtained real domination only in the second half of the XX century, with the urbanization and development of modern means of communication. The countryside became the last mainstay of the Belarusian language.

    At the turn of 80s-90s, Belarus gained independence on the wave of renaissance of native culture and language. However, in the opinion of many experts, this chance was lost due to Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s coming to power.

    - We would speak in Belarusian if the authorities, the president spoke in this language, is a common reply to the question “Why don’t we speak Belarusian?”.

    Ashamed to admit

    The current leader of Belarus, former head of a collective farm, is the classic example of a typical inhabitant of this country, who through the centuries was taught to be ashamed of his own language and who moving from country to city gets rid of the signs of his origin.

    Lukashenka had never spoken in pure Russian language and he, like a sizable part of the Belarusian population, uses “trasianka” in everyday life– a linguistic mixture, based on Russian, but containing a lot of lexical and phonetic features of the Belarusian language. For this reason, the degree of Russification of Belarusian society has reached the highest level in history. It has been almost entirely supplanted with education, media and public life.

    - 20 years ago it was difficult to meet a person in Belarus who didn’t understand Belarusian, - Zmicer Sauka recalls. Indeed, the majority of urban inhabitants didn’t use it, but hardly anyone had problems with understanding. Nowadays there are more and more such people, especially among young people. And this is the sad result of the politics of Belarus’ current authorities. People born during Lukashenka’s rule don’t even understand the language of their grandparents and great-grandparents, – the linguist resumes.

    The language of counterculture

    Even experts cannot estimate how many Belarusians use their native language everyday. The number of users is unlikely to exceed a few percent. The field of users is very specific and is represented by two extremes: on the one hand, older rural inhabitants, on the other – a handful of educated urban inhabitants, intelligentsia. These are often people who started to learn the language at a certain point in their lives.

    Usually they are regarded as freaks – in a shop, on streets, even in at home. For enthusiasts concerned with preserving the language, situations when the whole family speaks Russian and you speak Belarusian to them, when a husband uses Belarusian and wife – Russian, etc. are quite usual.

    At the same time, under Lukashenka’s rule the Belarusian language has become the language of counterculture. Along with the national symbols abolished by him (and replaced by flag and coat of arms from Soviet times), the language has become a banner in the fight for freedom and against authoritarian rule. Also, because using the Belarusian language has assumed a political subtext, a person who ostensibly speaks the language immediately becomes suspicious in the authorities’ eyes.

    Belarus – “the second Ireland”?

    Forecasts about the future of the Belarusian language are different. Some believe that Belarusians will be able to repeat the journey, for example, of the Czechs who in the early nineteenth century pulled their native tongue out of obscurity after several centuries of Germanization. The condition for this would be a top-down policy from the government which replaces the current one.

    However, an opposite example is modern Ireland. Most of the proud descendants of the Celts, who like to emphasize their separateness from Englishmen, do not use their native language in everyday life - despite years of efforts by the Irish government. Neither school, nor newspapers, nor television help.

    Wicket to history

    Experts advise taking a closer look. - We see how the rebirth of the Ukrainian language has advanced - Zmicier Sauka notes. - Its condition when the USSR collapsed differed little from the condition of the Belarusian language. There was a time when a person speaking in Ukrainian in Kiev was also a rarity. Today the situation has changed substantially, largely thanks to the will of the local ruling elite, - he adds.

    To the tiresome question "Why do you speak in Belarusian?" in an era when most of his countrymen do not do this, the author of this article has jokingly responded for some time now: - Well, even if I were the last person on Earth who spoke Belarusian, at least ... I would go down in history.

    Let’s hope not - I will add modestly at the end.

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    Veteran Member Ivan Kramskoï's Avatar
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    My great grand mother was born near Brest Litovsk in the late 19th century, she considered herself Russian and only spoke Russian but didn't have a Russian family name (I guess it could have been a Belarussian name).
    I don't have answer for this, perhaps because it was a very small ethnicity close to a bigger and quite close other they lost their language and a part of their culture.

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    Well the main thing is clearly that its so heavily influenced by Russia and Russian language. The fact that Russian and Belarusian are so similar also doesn't help since people will feel comfortable speaking it much quicker. I wouldn't say that its completely comparable to the loss of Irish language in Ireland because the Brits actually punished those who spoke Irish on many occasions and in many ways forced its extinction. I think the language is just proving to be not so useful and if there aren't real any hugely nationalistic attachments to it, its naturally going to die out. I know that in some ways Ukrainian was a language mostly spoken by rural people and wasn't really important even in Ukraine up until recently, if thats also the case in Belarus, which this article seems to suggest, then that could also be a reason.

    I don't find this to be particularly surprising. The only way they'll hold onto their language is through fierce attachment to it, which would probably be paired up with some sort of nationalist movement. (I.e. what the Basques have been doing ever since Franco died).

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    Veteran Member Methmatician's Avatar
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    I heard that they're reintroducing Belarusian into the schools over there. The reason they speak mostly Russian now is because of Russification and suppression of the Belarusian language by Lukashenko's government.

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    та потому шо это диалект русского, основная культура таки русская, как ни верти. Это как у вас в польше диалекты повыздыхивали под влиянием общего образования и пагубного влияния литературного стандарта. А, ну да, эт всё фигня, на самом деле путин белорусов сглазил.

    пс: вот шоб у нас с дыбилизирующим псевдонацизмом не выёбывались - было б как у белорусов. Во времена детства лаять на колхозном суржике считалось западло и признаком отсутствия ума и культуры (ага, на литературный вариант тямы не стало), а теперь - это повод для гордости, мол какой я невъёбанно автэнтычный, с ведром корявых русизмов с интернета и не к месту использованных англицизмов ( последний хит: лопата это "гаджет").

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    есть мнение, что белорусы правильно решили языковой вопрос по принципу: "не можешь срать - не мучай жопу", то есть при невозможности самостоятельно создать полновесное культурное и образовательное языковое пространство просто прилипли к уже существующему, экономя на этом кучу времени и средств.

    Кстати, что характерно, самопальные языковые движи в беларуси имеют такой же деградантский душок, как в ридном хохлостане.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Methmatician View Post
    I heard that they're reintroducing Belarusian into the schools over there. The reason they speak mostly Russian now is because of Russification and suppression of the Belarusian language by Lukashenko's government.
    It's goverment supports mainly belarussian language (look at descriptions of belarussian goods). Also: Lukashenko can't support russian language, cause he is hohol.

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    Veteran Member Jehan's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ЛыSSый View Post
    It's goverment supports mainly belarussian language (look at descriptions of belarussian goods). Also: Lukashenko can't support russian language, cause he is hohol.
    It's the opposite. Lukashenko support the russification of the country, probably because it allow a dictator like him to stay in power in the russian way of thinking. He once said:
    “nothing significant can be expressed” in belarussian.
    The reintroduction of belarussian is mainly due to the young belarussian nationalist oppose to Lukashenko.
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...age-belarusian

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    Quote Originally Posted by Veneda View Post
    It’s like Poles would speak in German
    No it isn't
    The two languages are very similar to begin with, and is one of the reasons they speak it

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    It’s like Poles would speak in German
    No it's not! What an ignorant statement. They are both Slavic and closely related. Here is a better example:

    It's like Norwegians would speak in Swedish.

    Or an even better example: a Plattdeutsch (Low German) person speaking Standard High German.
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