Linguae Europaeae

by Marshall Janevicius How can a national language be considered legitimate when the president of the nation does not believe in it? Alexander Lukashenko has been the authoritarian president of Belarus since 1994. Lukashenko has previously taken a stance that Belarusian is inferior to Russian, saying, “nothing significant can be expressed [in Belarusian].” Belarus, formerly Byelorussian SSR, gained its independence on August 25, 1991. Even though the Eastern European country has been independent for just over two decades, a near-century of soviet influence makes many Belarusians still feel like they are under direct Russian influence. Due to this, there is a stigma in Belarus that anything Belarusian is boring and that Russian is superior. How can a national language be considered legitimate when the president of the nation does not believe in it? Alexander Lukashenko has been the authoritarian president of Belarus since 1994. Lukashenko has previously taken a stance that Belarusian ...

Image Courtesy of Wikimedia Belarusian on the Road to Revival by Alyssa Lowery Alyssa Lowery graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2016 with a B.A. in Linguistics and Spanish. She wrote this blog post as a student in SPAN 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in Spring 2016. Many people assume that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marks the revival of Belarusian in Belarus; others believe the Ukraine Crisis has prompted the Belarusian people to begin reviving their language and culture; however, with a 2015 article on The Guardian stating that “no more than 10% of Belarusians say they communicate in Belarusian in their day-to-day lives,” it’s easy to question whether this is actually the case (Barushka, 2015). The question now is: is the Belarusian language being revived at all? During and immediately following the collapse of the USSR, there was certainly an increase in Belarusian language policies, such as the new Language Law, whi...