Eurasian Studies

Balkans, Anatolia, Iran, Caucasus and Central Asia Studies Notebooks

The Prospect of the Russian Language in Georgia. Insights from the Educated Youth

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Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the status of the Russian language in the new-born Republics became a central issue. In the Southern Caucasus, all the Constitutions promulgated by the three Republics opted for ethnocentric language policies that accepted the titular language as the only State Language. However, the role of the Russian language as a lingua franca remained crucial for international communication and everyday interaction. It followed that it continued to play an important role also in education. The present study focuses on Georgia, where a strong derussification policy has taken place in the last decades and aims at understanding to what extent the use of Russian among the young generations has contracted. In particular, we present an analysis conducted on data collected via (i) a survey for young people consisting of questions on their sociolinguistic background and a proficiency test in Russian, and (ii) semi-structured interviews for teachers of Russian and English as Foreign Languages on the research topics.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: May 2, 2020 | Accepted: June 29, 2020 | Published Oct. 22, 2020 | Language: en

Keywords Georgia • Sociolinguistics • Language policy • Derussification • Russian FL

Copyright © 2020 Daniele Artoni, Sabrina Longo. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-453-0/009


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