Russian Losing Ground

Although learning Russian is still encouraged in Tajikistan, the language is gradually losing ground there.



The Tajik constitution assigns Russian an important role as the lingua franca, and the government has made special efforts to encourage learners as fewer and fewer Tajiks are conversant in the language.



The decline is attributed to the large numbers of Russophones who have emigrated. According to some estimates, in this country of seven million people, there are only around 600,000 people left who are either ethnic Russians or use the language as their mother tongue.



There are still plenty of newspapers in Russian – almost as many as are published in Tajik, the state’s official language. Local FM radio station produce about 60 per cent of their programmes in Russian, and the only exception is television, where the two state channels only assign ten per cent of their time to Russian programming.



Despite this, in recent years Russian has lost much of the importance it once had, according to mathematics lecturer Ishok Nurov.



He blames the departure of the Russians. “Deprived of this live language environment, people no longer have a chance to learn [Russian] from practice rather than textbooks,” he said. “Russian offers immense possibilities as a medium of access to information in all areas of life, so one can see what people lose out on if they don’t know it.”



Abdulhamid Nozimov, the head of Russian at Tajikistan’s teacher training university, is alarmed that young people are no longer literate in Russian, while the spoken language of school-leavers is poor.



Russian is still fairly strong in urban areas, particularly the capital Dushanbe, home to many of the remaining native speakers and also to Tajik intellectuals fluent in Russian.



Things are much worse in rural areas, where language education in schools is hampered by the shortage of Russian teachers, many of whom emigrated during the 1992-97 civil war.



NBCentralAsia was told by an education ministry official that Russian is assigned just two hours a week in the schools, like any other foreign language, and Russian literature has been dropped from the curriculum.



However, interest in learning Russian is still alive. Many parents insist on their children acquiring a proper knowledge of the language, and the 15 remaining schools using Russian as the teaching medium are mostly attended by Tajik pupils.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)