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The Russian Meeting Place: A place to meet people and talk about all things Russian...
International Discussions about Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Travel, Music, Russian News, Ukrainian culture, Belarusian Dating, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kiev and other intelligent topics about life in the former Soviet Union. |
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| Any difference between Russian and Belarusian man? he says he's not russian, is Mozir like country? I'm from a city, Caracas and we both live in Las Vegas. He doesn't like Russians here....: |
As for not liking Russians in LV--I see nothing strange about that. My husband also dislikes Russian immigrants in the US for various reasons. And after two years in the US, he should be more or less over the major part of culture shock.
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Originally Posted by Kasandra
Any difference between Russian and Belarusian man? he says he's not russian, is Mozir like country? I'm from a city, Caracas and we both live in Las Vegas. He doesn't like Russians here....is he having a culture shock? Any info on Mozir man?
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Originally Posted by Eryk
>>My understanding about Russian and Belarusian culture is that they are ?>>very similar, if not practically the same.
This is true only in so far as you consider that Canadian and US culture are 'practically the same'. |
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>>Nearly all Belarusians speak Russian as their first language, Oh no they don't. In large cities almost all Belarusians can speak Russian to 'first language' standard (but that doesn't mean that they like doing so) but in many smaller towns and villages Belarusian is more common. |
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>>and Russian is spoken everywhere in cities-- stores, government offices,.. No it isn't - not in the sense you are implying. For example, you know the recorded announcements regarding the 'next stop' that are played on buses and trams etc? Belarusian language - even in Minsk. Next time you are over here take a look around at the signs on buildings etc. and count the number of times you see the letter "I" used in a cyrillic word. Each time you see that you are actually reading Belarusian, not Russian. |
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>>Belarusian and Russian culture seem practically the same when you are >>visiting Belarus. You once expressed an interest in visiting Dublin one day. For your own safety, please refrain from observing that Irish and English culture "seem practically the same" if you do so Eryk |
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The regime ruling Belarus is very clear in its language policy, and Russian is without a doubt the predominant language, particularly for the government (including in the courtrooms), commerce, and for publications, including newspapers. More and more official proceedings take place only in Russian... As far as the Belarusian government is concerned, the use of the Belarusian language is a political statement in today's (post-1995) Belarus--no matter if someone prefers to use Belarusian because it happens to be the language the person grew up using. To the government, the speaker (or writer) is a member of the opposition and thus a potential criminal willing to do anything to topple the government. "Smart" Belarusians who do not want trouble with the authorities only speak Russian, and especially so in public. The following are representative reports (it is very likely that most such events are never reported): o On April 14, 1998, three youths who were speaking Belarusian as they were walking near Kamarovsky Market in central Mensk were first beaten by security guards and attacked by their dogs, then taken to a police station where they were beaten by police. (Using Belarusian identified them as "members of the opposition and troublemakers.") o In May, 1998, the newspaper, Nasha Niva, was threatened by the Belarusian government for using Taraskevitza rather than using the officially sanctioned Narkomovka. o In August, 1998, the newspaper Nasha Niva was in court, defending itself for using the "wrong" (sic) type of Belarusian (that is, Taraskevitza instead of Narkmovoka). In an irony that appears to have escaped the Belarusian bureaucrats, the proceedings were in Russian. o In August, 1999, two youths were convicted of a minor crime, even though there was no evidence to convict them. The judge ruled that the use of the Belarusian language by the youths in the courtroom was evidence enough. o In 1998: (1) The Council of Ministers issued more than 2,000 resolutions and only 30 of them were in Belarusian, and (2) The prime minister issued only one percent of his directives in Belarusian. In the first six months of 1999, 8 resolutions and one directive were issued in Belarusian and 1,000 and 190, respectively, in Russian. o On Dec. 15, 1999: A judge in Brest did not allow the defendants' request for a Belarusian language translator. (source: BelaPAN, No. 60; Wednesday, December 15, 1999; 3:00 p.m.) o Of the 250 schools in Minsk, only 11 provide instruction in Belarusian. Approximately 114,000 children went to school for the first time this year (123,000 in 1999). The number of first-year schoolchildren in Belarus' classes with instruction in the Belarusian language dropped from 726 last year to approximately 500 this year. (source: BelaPAN, No. 4; Friday, September 1, 2000; 6:20 p.m.) information from: http://www.belarus-misc.org/bel-ling.htm |
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It is said that the president of Belarus is not fluent in Belarusian, and that he needs to use "crib notes" while making speeches and statements in Belarusian. (Name another country where its leader is not fluent in the language of that country!) |
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Currently, russification is taking place in Belarus on an ever-growing scale, and the government does not provide any support for the Belarusian language. In this respect, a fact of note is that the official website of the Belarusian President is in two languages: Russian and English (as of 2005) . |
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During Soviet times, the Belarusian language was viewed by many native speakers as a rural and peasant language as opposed to Russian's image as a modern and urban language. That image in the eyes of the public has changed somewhat in the years of Belarus independence: some perceive it as a language of the young emerging urban elite. Nevertheless, current Russification policies are seen by some as a serious threat that may lead to the eventual extinction of the Belarusian language in Belarus. The largest centre of Belarusian cultural activity, in the Belarusian language, outside Belarus is in the Polish province of Bialystok, which is home to a long-established Belarusian minority. |
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One of the reasons for this situation is the minority status of Belarusian speakers in urban areas—traditional cultural centers. For example, according to the 1897 Imperial Russian census, in Belarusian towns of more than 50,000 residents, only 7.3% respondents reported Belarusian as their mother tongue (the criterion in defining nationality for the purposes of the census). This state of affairs greatly contributed to a perception that Belarusian is a "rural", "uneducated" language. In the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, very few people wrote in Belarusian, peasants being mostly illiterate, and urban dwellers preferring Russian, Polish or Yiddish. Still there existed a minor movement for returning to the Belarusian language; it was important in the circle of friends of Adam Mickiewicz. -from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_language |
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On March 25, 1918, Belarusians proclaimed the independence of the Belarusian National Republic, but it was short-lived and didn't manage to stay independent. The official language of all communication in the BNR was Belarusian. In 1918–1919, Soviets took control of the Belarusian lands and created the Belarusian SSR. In the 1920s, a campaign of Belarusization started, as a part of the all-Union campaign of "Korenizatsiya" and revival of national cultures. Some administration and legal affairs began to be carried out in Belarusian and a large number of books were printed in the Belarusian language by prominent Belarusian authors and publicists: Yakub Kolas, Yanka Kupala, Zmitrok Biadulia, Maksim Bahdanovich, and many others. Active discussions were carried out about the standardisation of the language. The Belarusization was stalled and even reversed beginning in the 1930s. Hundreds of people were shot or sent to Siberia. The orthographic reform of 1933 clearly "russified" the Belarusian spelling rules. In 1938 Russian language become an obligatory subject in all Soviet schools. The final blow was the school reform of 1958, when parents were given the right to select the language of instruction for their children. After that, more and more people began to send their children to Russian-language schools, and the number of Belarusian-language schools began to diminish. Under the Soviets, there was also the elimination of the Belarusian middle class between 1917 and 1941 by the Communist Party; in Kurapaty (a suburb of Minsk), the NKVD killed perhaps 100,000 people. Many thousands of people were sent to concentration camps (Gulag) or resettled to Siberia. Around 400 Belarusian authors were repressed during anti-nationalism campaigns that started around 1929 and culminated during the Great Purge. |
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Interest in the Belarusian language was revived at the end of 1980s during perestroika. In 1990, Belarusian became the only official language of Belarusian SSR, and a second campaign of Belarusization followed. The "Law on languages" (Закон аб мовах), ratified on 26 January 1990, envisioned a complete switch of all administrative and official documentation of the country into Belarusian by 2000. However, the Belarusization was totally stopped following the election of Alexander Lukashenka in 1994. Also in 1995 there was a referendum which, among other things, gave Russian language an equal status with Belarusian. Currently, russification is taking place in Belarus on an ever-growing scale, and the government does not provide any support for the Belarusian language. |
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Conclusion The politicization of language issues has increasingly intensified since the progressive implementation of Lukashenka's authoritarian type of rule. Language has been an instrument of power in political conflicts between Lukashenka and the opposition. In this respect, language is part of the "psychological" violence87 that exists in Belarusian politics today. The Belarusian authorities present Belarusian as the language of counter-power and instability, and as a source of violent acts. This image of the Belarusian language, largely spread by the official media, is notably linked to demonstrations organized by the opposition, which are depicted as violent behavior toward the political authorities. By contrast, the president's discourses in Russian exhibit power, stability, and social peace and are used to justify the expansion of the police in the country. In other respects, both sides use a political language that can make verbal reference to violence. Violence is also implied by the vehement tone of the language as well as in the general relationships between Belarusian and Russian speakers. In some places, people refrain from speaking Russian or Belarusian for fear of the possible consequences. Moreover, demonstrators propagating the Belarusian language often face the threat of police brutality, which underscores the symbolic importance of language issues in the current political context. The use of terms such as "fascist" by both sides to define each other is pertinent in explaining this phenomenon. The contemporary development of the language of violence on one hand, and the violence of language on the other, confirms the political and cultural situation in post-Soviet Belarus during the 1990s. from: http://www.pravapis.org/art_goujon1.asp |
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With the decrease of the role of the Belorussian national language as a means of communication, the function of the Belorussian language as a symbol of national self-identification of a person becomes more and more distinct and important. This very function of the Belorussian language in a bilingual society should play the main role in preserving its status of full-function language of Belorussians. |
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Many 20th-century governments of Belarus had policies favouring the Russian language, and, as a result, Russian is more widely used in education and public life than Belarusian. Belarusian forms a link between the Russian and Ukrainian languages, since its dialects shade gradually… |
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Language "Language is not only a means of communication, but also the soul of a nation, the foundation and the most important part of its culture." So begins the January 1990 Law About Languages in the Belorussian SSR, which made Belarusian the sole official language of the republic. The Belarusian language is an East Slavic tongue closely related to Russian and Ukrainian, with many loanwords from Polish (a West Slavic language) and more recently from Russian. The standard literary language, first codified in 1918, is based on the dialect spoken in the central part of the country and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Under Polish influence, a parallel Latin alphabet (lacinka) was used by some writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is still used today by some Roman Catholics in Belarus and abroad. One early proponent of the Belorussian language, poet Frantsishak Bahushyevich (1840-1900), the father of modern Belorussian literature and a participant in the 1863 uprising, was inspired by the fact that many 200- and 300-year-old documents written in Belorussian could be read and understood easily in modern times. The theme of the native language as a repository of national identity and an expression of aspiration to nationhood has been the leitmotif of Belorussian literature and polemics beginning in the late nineteenth century. Although the tsarist government regarded the Belorussians as well as the Ukrainians as another branch of Russians, not as a separate nation, the Belorussian language was registered in the first systematic census of the Russian Empire in 1897. In the early 1920s, Belorussian language and culture flourished, and the language was promoted as the official medium of the communist party and the government as well as of scholarly, scientific, and educational establishments. Most primary and secondary schools switched to instruction in Belorussian, and institutions of higher education gradually made the switch as well. The Belorussian State University was founded in 1921, the Institute of Belorussian Culture was founded in 1922, and a number of other institutions of higher learning also opened. The interests of other minorities in the republic were taken into account in a July 1924 decree that confirmed equal rights for the four principal languages of the republic: Belorussian, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish. With the advent of perestroika, national activists launched a campaign of restoring the Belorussian language to the place it had enjoyed during the 1920s. To urge the government to make Belorussian the official language of the republic, the Belarusian Language Society was established in June 1989 with poet-scholar Nil Hilyevich as president. Belorussia's CPSU leadership, consisting almost exclusively of Russified technocrats, ignored all the government resolutions and decisions on languages. However, it could not ignore the general language trend throughout the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union, particularly in the neighboring Baltic states and Ukraine, where national movements were stronger and exerted an influence on events in the Belorussian SSR. After months of meetings, rallies, conferences, and heated debates in the press, on January 26, 1990, the Supreme Soviet voted to make Belarusian the official language of the state, effective September 1, 1990. The law included provisions for protecting the languages of minorities and allowed up to ten years to make the transition from Russian to Belarusian. Despite the provisions, implementation of the law has encountered both active and passive resistance: many people still want their children to be educated in the Russian language rather than in Belarusian, and some government officials agree to give interviews only in Russian. According to data assembled in 1992 by the Sociology Center of the Belarusian State University, some 60 percent of those polled prefer to use Russian in their daily life, 75 percent favor bilingualism in state institutions, and only 17 percent favor having the government declare Belarusian the sole official language. One Western source reported that in the early 1990s, only 11 percent of the population, most of whom lived in the countryside, were fluent in Belarusian. Since late 1992, there had been a growing demand that the Russian language be given the same official status as Belarusian. The results of the four-question referendum of May 1995, which included a question on whether Russian should be an official language, put an end to any uncertainty; the populace voted "yes." from: http://countrystudies.us/belarus/19.htm |
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One Western source reported that in the early 1990s, only 11 percent of the population, most of whom lived in the countryside, were fluent in Belarusian. |
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According to data assembled in 1992 by the Sociology Center of the Belarusian State University.... only 17 percent favor having the government declare Belarusian the sole official language. |
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Originally Posted by Eryk
>>2) While the U.S. and Canada were never the same country, Russia and >>Belarus functioned as the same territory 15 years ago. In so far as the USSR was a 'Russian Empire' ruled from Moscow you are correct, however the same applies to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and (to only a slightly lesser degree) Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia etc. |
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>>Russian and Belarusian people traveled freely between Russia and Belarus >>for decades before the fall of the Soviet Union. No they didn't. People did not travel 'freely' within the USSR - that is what internal passports and 'propiskas' are all about. Migration within the USSR was a strategic process designed to meet the twin goals of economic development and dilution/destruction of national identity. |
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>>There are millions of people in Belarus who were either born in Russia, or >>who have parents who were born in Russia. Many families in Belarus have >>uncles, parents, or siblings who live in Russia. Quite correct and this observation applies equally to the Baltic states and the east of Ukraine. |
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>>How often do you hear Belarusian spoken in Minsk, or other Belarusian >>cities? Regularly ...many times a day. You can perform a simple check for yourself: next time you are standing at a bus stop by the kiosk, count the number of times you hear "pazhalsta" but also the number of times you hear "kalilaska". |
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>>What are the clear distinct differences between popular Belarusian culture >>and Russian culture? Young people in Belarus listen to Russian music. >>Russian film and TV programs are the staple of the Belarusian media diet. 'Popular culture' isn't the issue here, if it were then we would conclude that Russians and Americans are virtually identical due to the fact that Coca Cola, McDonalds, Britney (sp?) Spears and Hollywood Movies all occur in both places. A Belarusian nationalist's dislike of being identified as a 'Russian' would more likely be a product of issues going back centuries ...just as Irish antagonism towards the English goes back about 1000 years. Eryk |
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Originally Posted by Eryk
>>How many Belarusians speak Belarusian as their FIRST language?
It is really a false question. Everyone I know here is completely fluent in Russian and the vast majority in Belarusian also -- which language they use depends upon the precise situation. The notion that everyone must have a single, defined "first language" and all others must be secondary to it is an artificial one --- if you went to some parts of Africa you yould find people who speak half a dozen "first languages" --- or perhaps "have no first language" --- depending upon your point of view. Eryk |
) so I cannot analyse complete conversations between strangers that easily but what I can say is I hear distinctly Belarusian 'snatches' of conversations all the time and I know several people personally who speak always use Belarusian in the first instance in any conversation.
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