Languages in a Globalized World

I often ask myself why people have official languages imposed on them. Why can’t the society decide for itself which language or languages to use and which to abandon? Trying to answer this question would lead us to the basic ideas of sovereignty and nation-building. Without a common language we may lose an important factor of social cohesion. But how come one language becomes dominant, the others are officially tossed to the bucket of oblivion?

Historically, the dominant power, the sovereign, the national elite, the church held the strings, had the means to impose their language of choice on the populace. But the situation has changed. Now we live in a new world order where a nation, or even a commercial enterprise, is no longer the key factor of globalization. The society itself, individuals take the bull by its horns. Now each and every one of us is empowered to step up the process of social, economic and cultural integration and consolidation.

Thomas Friedman argued in his book “The World is Flat” that

around the year 2000 we entered a whole new era: Globalization 3.0. Globalization 3.0 is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 the thing that gives it its unique character is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. And the lever that is enabling individuals and groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly is not horsepower, and not hardware, but software— all sorts of new applications in conjunction with the creation of a global fiber optic network that has made us all next door neighbors. Individuals must, and can, now ask, Where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally?

Throughout the previous eras, language has been an important factor of globalization. First, the European countries spread their national languages to the colonies, diminished and later rooted out the usage of indigenous languages. Then the global corporate world had its say. The say was oftener in English, but later the companies began employing local languages, as they tried to appeal to markets around the globe. Now it is us, individuals, collaborating and competing globally, who are pushing forward the globalization process. In addition to our professional skills, language has become our key to success. Language literacy, especially the good command of English and other competitive languages, becomes a commodity, a great advantage on anyone’s resume.

I have seen an ad of a Czech software company on a Lithuanian job hunting site. The company is hiring software developers; it needs C#, Java, LAMP programmers, user interface designers, etc. It is ready to pay some €800 for relocation; the salary is quite impressive, too, considering the Lithuanian average. Knowledge of Czech is not required, proficiency in English is.

When Latvia became independent from the Soviet Union, the new Latvian elite was eager to abandon all ties with Russian occupants altogether, to break free politically, economically and even culturally. But the leaders of new independent Latvia did not take into account that nearly half of Latvia’s population comprised of Russian speakers. I will leave out the long stories about the discriminatory policies the Latvian government has imposed on the Latvian Russians who lived most of their life in Latvia and at a blink of an eye were turned into disfranchised non-citizens. Now Latvia has joined the European Union, the borders opened, the new opportunities drove hundreds of thousands to the West. Latvian economy soon enough began feeling an urgent demand for workforce. The tough language policies of the last decade began softening up. Russians are not that unwelcome any more. Even if they were “foreigners” and “occupants,” they have become a necessity for Latvian businesses to survive. Back in the 1990s, Russian language was made optional in Latvian schools. Together with compulsory Latvian, English was the language of choice for young Latvians. As a result, they can hardly speak Russian now. Who would have thought that after Latvia’s accession to the European Union, companies in Riga, the capital of Latvia, would still need Russian to do business at the domestic market? In fact, Riga businesses are now reluctant to hire persons who do not know Russian.

Similarly, the knowledge of Spanish is becoming an important skill in the United States. It is a great bonus in some businesses and a requirement in others. Unlike Latvia or Poland, the United States has no official language. Many see it as a problem. They fear that the melting pot will stop melting if America becomes more polylingual. In Congress, there was a continuous effort to pass the English Language Amendment that would make English the official language of the country, but the bill never passed. Yet, many states have enacted similar legislation on a state level. The bill’s opponents contended that the society was able to self-regulate, and such laws would bring nothing but linguistic discrimination to the diverse ethnic groups in the United States. Despite the legal powers of English in some states, the society votes by its purse: the Spaniards-oriented TV and radio programming is booming, newspaper advertising pays off, services available in Spanish lure more and more customers. Individuals, not the state, become a more prominent actor at the language market. This market is no longer a monophony of the sovereign, rather a polyphony of citizens.

The examples above show the role of language in a new globalized world. The new world order is putting forward its own rules of the game. The knowledge of languages has become a commodity, an advantage. The nation-state is still setting up rules and standards, but these rules are not always in step with time.

One might say the two most important faculties for a modern man is computer literacy and English language proficiency. It is not exactly so. There are still hundreds of languages which are also apt to making money in a globalized world. But other smaller languages do not turn much profit; rather they are a requirement in the states where they are made official. The nation-states are trying to preserve their linguistic dominance, authenticity and purity of their officially endorsed languages. But sooner or later individuals may start asking questions why we should care to learn a language of around million people or less. Why should I waste my time and money on a totally uncompetitive skill? Companies can also start posing questions: why should we waste our money to hire translators to prepare labels and manuals in Estonian or Belarusian if almost every Estonian can read in English or Finnish, and every Belarusian can read and speak Russian? European politicians will sooner or later ask why maintain an army of translators to convert a never-ending pile of legal texts, session scripts, etc. into all national languages of the EU member states. Such questions have already been popping up in Brussels. More is destined to follow.

What does globalization 3.0 mean to us, speakers of smaller languages like Belarusian or Lithuanian? Does it mean we are a few steps, or rather a few generations, from our languages’ extinction? Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, writes the New York Times, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.

If we look closer at the globalization 3.0 Tom Friedman described in his book, the knowledge of a major language becomes a great advantage, a skill you’d better have if you want to be competitive. We are motivated to learn languages spoken by more people than our mother’s tongue was, just as we are stimulated to learn more sophisticated software than our parents knew. Plus, it often happens that we are not motivated enough to learn our mother’s tongue when we are armored with the knowledge of a more competitive language. Most of the time, we do not need such motivation to speak our native tongue, we just know it, it is naturally ours. But what if the society we live in has two or three official languages competing one against another? What if we have a choice what language to go with? And what if the dominant group, the elite has chosen to endorse a language other than my own? What if that dominant language has become the language of education, religious sermons, electronic and print media? What if most of my peers speak that other more popular language? What if that other language is becoming more competitive than my mother’s not only on the global scale but in my own society? This is exactly what is happening in Belarus.

Belarusian Language: My Personal Story

Before I return to the question of Belarusian language survival, let me relate my personal linguistic story. For most of my life, I have spoken Belarusian. This is a native tongue of my grandparents who used it alongside with Polish. Russian was alien to them, and they failed to master it properly.

But the maps were redrawn in the XX century. Together with the title of the country, changed social, cultural and linguistic climate in my part of the world. Before 1939, Western Belarus had been part of Poland where Polish was the official language. Under the Molotov-Ribentropp Pact, Western Belarus was reunited with the Soviet Republic of Belarus. Belarus survived the Nazi occupation and was retaken by the Soviets in 1944. My parents were born after the war in the same region as my grandparents but in a totally different country, the Soviet Union, where Russian dominated in all spheres of life. Moscow conducted a well-orchestrated policy of russification in all 15 republics it controlled. My mom and dad got the best and the worst of the Soviet education, received university degrees and, as educated townsfolk at that time, practically abandoned their mother’s tongue, deliberately chose Russian as the language of everyday communication.

I remember the time when my father reprimanded me as soon as he spotted a Belarusian word slipping into my vocabulary. He considered Belarusian to be lowly, inferior to Russian. How could a peasant’s talk compare to “the language of science and great Russian literature?” Back then, he bought full book collections of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, read Novy Mir and Literaturnaya Gazeta. Our home library was, probably, one of the best in town. Most of our books were in Russian. So I picked it up pretty easily. Unlike my father, my mom was born in a village, but she worked as a teacher of Russian language and literature. No surprise, Russian came pretty naturally to me.

For better or for worse, my parents thought it would be right for me not to go to a kindergarten. Instead they sent me to my grandparents, who lived in a village. There my exposure to spoken Russian was cut off. I remember reading the Polish primer, attending sermons in a local Catholic congregation, learning some prayers in Polish. But the language I heard all around me in that village was Belarusian. My overwhelming exposure to it angered my parents, but they thought it best for me to stay with my grandparents for a couple of years. So I did. Embraced the language, heard all those granny’s mysterious fairytales, folk stories, and legends, read the old books from the granny’s garret, and listened to my granddad’s war stories.

I can consider both Belarusian and Russian to be my native tongues, or rather the former my native, the latter my native-like. During the Perestroika times, my father rediscovered the Belarusian culture for himself. He started attending a local history club and befriended an ethnographer and expatriate Uladzimir Skrabatun. My dad’s national awakening led him to the Belarusian National Front, the first Belarusian pro-democracy independence movement. He even chaired its local unit in Hlybokaje, my hometown. Since then my dad has always spoken Belarusian, just as his parents did when they were alive.

As far as I was concerned, my father’s national awakening helped me understand the value of our nation’s culture, language, and history. My dad was a great influence on my own worldview. I read the Belarusian newspapers he subscribed to, listened with him to the Belarusian Service of Radio Liberty.

Now my family speaks Belarusian at home with the exception of my younger sister who usually speaks Russian. Her exposure to the Russian [pop] culture was much heavier and more long-lasting than mine.

Unlike her, I grew up listening to the vibe of the American and British tunes. Since early childhood, I was taken with the alluring wind of changes blowing from the West. I listened to Lithuanian FM radio M1 with predominantly Western airplay mix, later switched to the BBC World Service and Voice of America. Shortwave radio helped me learn English, MTV and rock music gave motivation to do it. The pro-Western Belarusian speaking opposition was the force I could relate to. The Western, European path for Belarus was the choice I wanted with all my heart.

Since my senior years in high school, I found Belarusian speaking friends, most of them older than me. In college, I joined the Belarusian Association of Students, a pro-democracy youth nonprofit, where most members spoke Belarusian. My sister had no such experience. All her peers spoke Russian, her boyfriend spoke Russian. Just we, the immediate family, spoke Belarusian to her.

Why Don’t They Speak Belarusian? Why Should They?

Now I speak Belarusian with my friends and family, but, in Minsk, I often have to employ Russian either to be understood or to be taken for a “normal” guy, not an opposition activist. The usage of Belarusian is falling throughout the country. The number of Belarusian language classes has dropped over the past few years to nearly a handful. In the town of Maladzechna, writes Nasha Niva, there remains just one freshmen class whose study language is Belarusian. Parents do not want their children to enroll in the Belarusian language classes. “How would our children live if they chose Belarusian language of training,” ask the parents, “everything in the country is in Russian?”

They have a point. None of the country’s universities offer education in Belarusian. Most college level courses are available in Russian only. There are no text books in Belarusian, no good instructors who can teach in Belarusian. The official policy of Lukashenko government has gradually undermined the role of the Belarusian language in our society.

On the other hand, the Belarusian tongue is still alive in anti-Lukashenko circles. It has become the language of change, the language of alternative democratic Belarus, dreamed of by some (not all) younger, more educated Belarusians. However, most of such speakers have not inherited the language from their parents. They have learnt it from books and through communication with their peers, while their parents are either Russian speakers or trasianka speakers. Sic: Trasianka is a mixture of Russian and Belarusian words spiced up with the Belarusian pronunciation.

The Belarusian speech is still heard in the countryside. Many senior Belarusian villagers, however, do not define their language as Belarusian. They would rather call it a “common speak.” Many of them use a rather peculiar mixture of Belarusian and Russian. This vernacular language vinaigrette is known as “trasianka.” Most trasianka speakers would call their language “Russian” or “common.” Few would define the language they speak as Belarusian. Trasianka is a very underresearched phenomenon; in essence, it is similar to Spanglish (a crude medley of Spanish and English) or Franglais (English-French mix). Unlike native pidgin or creole languages, Trasianka has no stable vocabulary, distinctive codified grammar. Recently, there have been multiple instances of Trasianka making it to popular culture (pop, rock music, TV programs), but still it bears a mark of low prestige with respect to both Belarusian and Russian.

Trasianka usage is not confined within the rural areas. As Minsk population grows through mass migration of workforce from the regions, the vernacular pronunciation is spotted in all social strata of the Belarusian nation, from a small hamlet to the state capitol, from a carpenter to a minister.

Is Trasianka harmful? The chairman of the Belarusian Language Association Aleh Trusau does not think so. He believes that the Russian standard language transmutes into Trasianka as it intermingles with the Belarusian colloquial speech. The Russian minority is gradually assimilated as their speech acquires the features of Trasianka. Others argue that it is the Belarusian language which is gradually russified, and Trasianka is the agent of this process.

The natural Belarusian language I was still able to hear at my grandparents’ village is dying together with the older generation. A year ago, I visited that village. Of 100 households in 1960s, just six-seven survived in 2007. The village is dying out. Lukashenko’s agricultural policy means to enlarge rural settlements. Smaller villages are neglected, people move to new houses built in so called agro-gorodoks (agricultural towns). The program was supposed to motivate specialists to move from cities to villages, but in reality larger settlements lured villagers from the smaller ones. The Belarusian speakers from authentic villages further dissolved in the ocean of Russian predominance.

The Unclear Future of Belarusian

Learning languages in the globalized world is important. The more you know the better. At different points in my life, apart from Belarusian, Russian and English, I studied French, German, Polish, and Lithuanian. Some languages came with ease, others were hard to grasp. Motivation was always important. It is harder to find it when the language is spoken by a considerably small ethnic or national group. I understand that many Belarusian nationals speaking Russian in their day-to-day life lack such motivation. Belarusian is actively spoken by around one million people. Many more, like my sister, know it to some degree but do not use it for interpersonal communication. According to the poll conducted by the Belarusian Independent Institute of Socio-Economic and Political Studies in 2006, 52.8 percent of respondents named Russian as the language of their everyday communication, just 7.8 percent said they spoke Belarusian, 16.1 percent said they used both Russian and Belarusian, and 23.0 said they spoke Trasianka, a crude mixture of the two languages. The data indicate that less than a million people actually use the Belarusian language on the daily basis for interpersonal communication. 16.1 percent contended that they used both languages. It would be interesting to know the ratio of the usage. In the society where Russian has taken over, would the ratio be 1:1 or rather 10:1?

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko does not speak Belarusian. In fact, he allowed himself to make derogatory remarks toward the Belarusian language. He notably declared that there were just two languages worth learning – English and Russian. Since his very first term in the office, the influence of the Belarusian language has been gradually diminishing. There were multiple instances of repressions against Belarusian speakers. Speaking Belarusian in cities has become an act of political dissent. Belarusian is widely spoken by the opposition activists, so the government officials and Lukashenko’s hardcore electorate tend to react quite negatively when they hear the language of the hateful nationalists.

What does the future hold for the language of my ancestors? I do not think there was an immediate threat of extinction. Paradoxically, the anti-Belarusian stance Lukashenko has bolsters the popularity of the Belarusian language among the rebellious youth groups discontent with the government’s policies. Belarusian has become the language of rock music and blogging. There are thousands of Belarusian language sites online; some are among the most popular in the country. Belarusian is used by the foreign-funded electronic media like Belsat (satellite channel broadcasting from Poland), Radio Racyja, European Radio for Belarus, Radio Liberty, some prominent independent newspapers, and a bunch of web sites.

However, this rebellious popularity of Belarusian is just a temporary success. Unless the Belarusian government takes serious steps to secure the protection of rights of Belarusian speakers the language is doomed for gradual demise. With less and less Belarusian language in classes and no universities where Belarusian would be the primary language of teaching, we should expect a new generation of Belarusians to appear raised on Russian textbooks and pop culture. Like my sister, they would not be motivated to speak their mother’s tongue when all their peers speak Russian, a more competitive language in bilingual Belarus.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Belarusian was made the only official language of the country. However, the long years of Soviet occupation resulted in a hardly-fixable russified nation we have. Lukashenko came to power in 1994 promising the best of the Soviet past. He was fast to make Russian another official language of the country. Gradually, the language of our Eastern neighbor gained more and more prominence. Now we have less Belarusian language in newspapers (even the independent ones), less Belarusian language on state TV and radio, we have less Belarusian in school and universities.

It is quite painful to see the gradual fall of my native tongue. But then I ask myself – how would it be different if Belarus was less isolated? What will happen to the Belarusian language when Belarusian citizens become active players in Globalization 3.0 I discussed in the beginning of the article? Undoubtedly, Belarusian is losing on the global playing field, but what is even worse it is losing in its own country. Russian is the language spoken by absolute majority of Belarusians and 300 - 350 million people worldwide. It is the language of mass culture superior by its scope, financial success, and outreach in our region.

Not even the Belarusian opposition can ignore the status of Russian in Belarusian society. In 2006 Presidential Election, both opposition candidates, Alaksandr Milinkevich and Alexander Kozulin, used Russian extensively in their campaign to brush aside the nationalist image. The only thing that could temporarily turn around the demise of Belarusian language is direct state support for it. But for how long will it be the remedy? And will the globalizing Belarusian society be willing to take it?