Why is the Russian language not a popular language for former East Block countries? (England, Swedish)
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No and on, even Latin has a better chance to re-surface than Russian. The war in Ukraine had made people many times less likely than before to consider learning Russian, in the next 30 years at least: no chance. And after 30 years Russia will have demographics problem + even less people using Cyrillic.
No and on, even Latin has a better chance to re-surface than Russian. The war in Ukraine had made people many times less likely than before to consider learning Russian, in the next 30 years at least: no chance. And after 30 years Russia will have demographics problem + even less people using Cyrillic.
Well we'll definitely see how things turn out regardless , I'm only making educated guesses based on what I know from ( among other things ) what sort of stuff I hear average people grumble about in my specific stomping ground .
At any rate I'll let this thread get back more onto the general theme of language , but nice talking ( or should I say typing ) to you as always .
Last edited by William Blakeley; 11-14-2022 at 03:22 PM..
1) It's just not very useful. The overwhelming number of native Russian speakers are found in the 15 countries comprising the former Soviet Union. In Russia is where you'll find 85% of them, but there are few economic or cultural reasons to interact with Russia. After Russia, Ukraine: do I really need to explain this one? Then, Kazakhstan - how useful is that? The three countries that weren't part of the USSR where Russian is most spoken are Germany, Israel, and the United States. But in all those cases, either English or German would be far more useful. And in the three ex-Soviet states that are economically sound and liberal democracies (the Baltic states)? Again, there are more English speakers.
2) As others have mentioned, it is the language of the oppressive occupiers who have been kicked out but whose government still threatens its neighbors. Who wants that?
3) The Cyrillic script is a challenge, as most of eastern Europe uses Latin letters, the exceptions being Bulgaria and, to a lesser extent, the Serbs.
In short, English is far more useful, and French and German are significantly more useful. Consider a Pole. Learning English means you can practice it with more than 13 million other Poles who speak English. That's well over 100x as many Russian speakers in Poland. In most countries in Europe, more than a third of the population speaks English. By comparison, outside of the former USSR and Germany, no country in Europe has more than 100,000 Russian speaker. So this imaginary Pole can tour most of Europe engaging with the locals in English. He can read more world literature than any other language will allow. He can enjoy the films of the Anglosphere, as well as their TV and their popular music. It may well serve him in his career. Russian? Not so much (to put it mildly).
This is not to say that there's anything wrong with learning Russian. I find far more obscure languages, such as Frisian and Faroese, compelling. But you asked why Russian isn't more popular in eastern Europe. And really, the reasons are pretty clear.
Quote:
Originally Posted by euro123
Forget it. Maybe in distant Anglophonic countries such as Australia (OP's country) and America Russia is seen as cool/exotic but you can safely exclude both eastern and western europe for as long as Russian-learning Renaissance is concerned. Maybe in Africa or China though I'm not sure.
Russian? Cool in the United States? Uh... no. It's not that it's particularly uncool, either. It's just totally off the radar.*
The 'big three' foreign languages taught here in high school are, and have long been, Spanish, French, and German,*in that order. Then there's a fair drop-off to a handful of languages like Mandarin and Latin and Japanese and Italian, and I'm sure there there are other languages with some regional presence. I live in Minnesota, where Russian ranks 10th in non-English languages taught in high schools, right behind Ojibwe (a local indigenous language) and just ahead of Hebrew. Out of about a quarter million high school students here, Russian classes are taken by a few hundred (a fraction of 1%). According to a 2016 study, it also ranks 10th in U.S.*universities/colleges, with ~20k studying it (out of about 1.4m studying a non-English language). It has a very small niche, because is has little utility and its cultural significance is mostly in the past.
Well the Glagolitic script was created Macedonian town of Ohrid, and used by missionaries in Slavic lands. However the Glagolitic script, was eventually evolved to the Cyrillic alphabet. The Glagolitic script and the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet and share commonalities.
Well there are considerable countries in the former USSR abanding the Cyrillic alphabet in favour of the Latin alphabet. However it has brought problems such as:
The transition to the Latin alphabet, in fact, led to a decrease in the general level of science, culture, and even the literacy of the population. Young people of these countries who do not know the Cyrillic alphabet to a certain extent have been cut off from the rich cultural heritage of the 20th century. It is not by chance that schools and classes with instruction in Russian in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan are overcrowded: the number of students per teacher is usually much greater there than in schools with instruction in the state languages.
Great difficulties are experienced by the older generation, brought up in Cyrillic and not fully understanding the new inscriptions and texts in the Latin script; there is also a certain misunderstanding with the younger generation. As a result of the ongoing language reforms, many representatives of the titular nations (in both younger and older age groups) speak the official Latinized literary languages increasingly more poorly. According to representatives of the Uzbek intelligentsia, “no matter how much, for example, English or Chinese are promoted, we do not know a single local author who would become famous for prose or poetry in these languages, which are worthy but still alien to the main population of our region” [cited from 9].https://link.springer.com/article/10...19331622020010
I have been learning French for years and in the first few weeks of learning Russian, I was surprised to hear there are some common words used in Russian that sounded French and the words had the same meaning in the French language.
All very good analysis, just one error though: Ukraine uses cyrillic too, even their "latin" "i" was historically cyrillc, everything else is 99% as in Russian.
I have been learning French for years and in the first few weeks of learning Russian, I was surprised to hear there are some common words used in Russian that sounded French and the words had the same meaning in the French language.
In the times of Peter I and after Russian was considered too much of a language "simple-mortals" and their aristocracy used to speak French at home instead. On another note Russian, French (ok Ukrainian too) are the 3 languages I can't stand, no idea but at least this should tell you they may have something in common.
^ Also: saying Ukraine doesn't use Cyrillic is completely inexcusable these days lol, after all CNN is trying to teach you 24/7 in the past couple of months about Ukraine. I'm sure statements like this one have political propaganda behind them "haha Ukraine is cool, they use Latin but Bulgaria = borat so they use Cyrillic like that racist Putin". Then again it could be just an error, I'm still shocked a chemist on twitter claimed CO3 doesn't exist and then admitted he was wrong...
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