Book review: Michael S. Gorham, After Newspeak: Language Culture and Politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The media is a crucial site of the articulation, contestation, and inculcation of beliefs about language, or language ideologies. In media discourse, these ideologies are not only represented in actors' and journalists' judgments about language matters, but also realized in the actual use of language. This article analyzes ideologies of language use which are articulated and embodied in contemporary Ukrainian media discourse. By examining both the presentation of language processes in society and the language practices of the media itself, I show how this discourse presents a rather ambivalent idea of the actual and appropriate language use in post-Soviet Ukraine. On the one hand, Ukrainian is assumed to be the only/primary language of the state and society, a symbolic marker of the nation, and a language that (all) citizens identify with; on the other, Russian appears to be an (equally) acceptable language of virtually all social practices. Thus the media both reflects an ambivalent normality that Ukrainian citizens inherited from the Soviet times and reproduces it in the interests of the dominant political and media elites.
Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet National Languages: Their Present, past and Future
The Modern Language Journal, 1987
The importance of language in the life of a nation requires no special elaboration. The native language, particularly for the so-called "non-historical" or stateless nations of Eastern Europe, has served as a focus of national awareness. This is not to say that language alone defines nationality. Rather, for nations like the Ukrainian, whose efforts at attaining national statehood have largely been frustrated, the role and status of the native language (i.e., "the language question") has been and continues to be a paramount issue in the quest for legitimization and authentication of the nation itself. The language, to paraphrase Joshua Fishman, becomes to a large extent the message of nationalism. 1 The symbolic function of language, implicit in the foregoing, has been noted in the case of the Ukrainians. Thus, Walker Connor has written that Ukrainian unrest is popularly reported as an attempt to preserve the Ukrainian language against Russian inroads ....This propensity to perceive an ethnic division in terms of the more tangible differences between the groups is often supported by the statements and actions of those involved. In their desire to assert their uniqueness, members of a group are apt to make rallying points of their more tangible and distinguishing institutions. Thus, the Ukrainians, as a method of asserting their non-Russian identity, wage their campaign for national survival largely in terms of their right to employ the Ukrainian, rather than the Russian, tongue in all oral and written matters. But would not the Ukrainian nation (that is, a popular consciousness of being Ukrainian) be likely to persist even if the language were totally replaced by Russian, just as the Irish nation has persisted after the virtual disappearance of Gaelic, despite pre-1920 slogans that described Gaelic and Irish identity as inseparable? Is the language the essential element of the Ukrainian nation, or is it merely a minor element which has been elevated to the symbol of the nation in its struggle for continued viability? 2 One might add that this "high visibility" of the language question in the Ukrainian case has been conditioned not only by the purposefulness of the nation seeking to establish its identity, but also by the determination of
Language and Social Change: New Tendencies in the Russian Language
This issue of kultura was ready for publication when, on Saturday, 7 October, news broke of the murder of the well-known Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Most Russian media assumed it was a contract killing, and noted that the murder had taken place on President Putin’s birthday. Politkovskaya had targeted Putin in her critical articles ever since he came to power. At fi rst glance, this tragedy has nothing do with either culture or the Russian language. Nevertheless, readers of this edition will notice that the way certain people speak is more relevant to Russia’s political culture than may at fi rst be suspected. This is true, above all, of the speech behaviour of Vladimir Putin, the protagonist of Russian politics. The French socio-linguist Rémi Camus builds his enquiry into the main features of early 21st century Russian political language around a micro-analysis of a single remark by Vladimir Putin. In 1999, at a press conference shortly before the outbreak of the second Chechen war, the then prime minister uttered a sentence which has since become his linguistic business card and, more generally, a cultural symbol of his fi rst seven years in power. However, any analysis of language and politics must look beyond offi cial rhetoric and politicians’ verbiage. The philosopher Alexei Penzin writes about the language of the new Russian Left, made up of young people who were children or teenagers when the USSR collapsed. The neo-Marxist philosophers, artists and sociologists who have come together in the What is to be done? group are faced with a massive rejection of all things ‘left’ by a majority of their post-Soviet compatriots. Penzin refl ects on whether young Russian intellectuals can ever hope to develop a language of their own out of the vocabulary of the Western mainstream liberal left born of the ruins of the Second World War. In the second analysis of this issue, fi ve Russian poets who maintain weblogs refl ect upon the ways in which that medium affects poetic language. By publishing their texts in blogs, they enter a unique dialogue with their readers, who effectively become co-authors. The poets are well aware of the threat this new relationship poses to their poetic self. The role of the muse is now played by their online ‘friends’. These readers are both like a many-headed hydra insatiably hungering for new texts, and like a siren who treacherously holds out the promise of linguistic variety, but often ultimately offers nothing but linguistic degeneration. The fi nal article deals with the predicament of the Russian language outside Russia’s present-day borders: in Ukraine, the cradle of medieval Rus. Kyiv-based philologist and journalist Mariya Kopylenko discusses the paradoxes of Russian- Ukrainian bilingualism. Her essay centres on the phenomenon of ‘semi-lingualism’. She sees this as a threat to Ukrainian society and its cultural self-awareness, which is lagging far behind its new-found political sovereignty. ABOUT THE GUEST EDITOR: Gasan Gusejnov (born in 1953) is a philologist, historian of culture and essayist. He is currently participating in a research project on the history of samizdat at Bremen University’s East European Centre. He has a research interest in political language and history of ideas.
Culture as Politics: A Note on Language Legislation in Putin’s Russia
Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies
One of the goals of this volume, and of the conference that led to its compilation, is to point at the significance of our fields, to show the world in what ways languages — and modern language studies — are important, to demonstrate that language, history, culture, literature — and knowledge about these topics — are essential to society. Now, there is a range of possible answers to the question “important to whom?” In this article, I discuss the ways in which culture in general, and language in particular, has become an important field of attention to the authorities in today’s Russia, and for a particular purpose. Over the last decade, Russian authorities have significantly increased their involvement in the cultural field, creating programmes for the patriotic education of citizens, adopting new laws and regulations affecting film, literature and art, and exploring the capital of culture for all it is worth. It is important to get a firm grasp of the state’s renewed interest in c...
Ideologies of language use in post-Soviet Ukrainian media
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2010, Issue 201, Pages 79–104, 2010
The media is a crucial site of the articulation, contestation, and inculcation of beliefs about language, or language ideologies. In media discourse, these ideologies are not only represented in actors' and journalists' judgments about language matters, but also realized in the actual use of language. This article analyzes ideologies of language use which are articulated and embodied in contemporary Ukrainian media discourse. By examining both the presentation of language processes in society and the language practices of the media itself, I show how this discourse presents a rather ambivalent idea of the actual and appropriate language use in post-Soviet Ukraine. On the one hand, Ukrainian is assumed to be the only/primary language of the state and society, a symbolic marker of the nation, and a language that (all) citizens identify with; on the other, Russian appears to be an (equally) acceptable language of virtually all social practices. Thus the media both reflects an ambivalent normality that Ukrainian citizens inherited from the Soviet times and reproduces it in the interests of the dominant political and media elites.
Language Ideologies in Flux: Evgenij Popov’s Response to Late and Post-Soviet Language Culture
The article proposes a reading of two novels by Evgenij Popov (b. 1946), Nakanune nakanune (1993) and Podlinnaja istorija «Zelenych muzykantov» (1999), as a response to “the language question” in post-perestroika Russian culture and society. The heterogeneous linguistic landscape of Nakanune – a remake of Turgenev's classic Nakanune – is compared to the “theoretical” reflections on language and style found in the numerous footnotes contained in Podlinnaja istorija. The comparative view opens up for a discussion of two principal types of metalanguage and the differences and interactions between them: explicit commentary on language and linguistic reflexivity through linguistic practice. For the latter, I propose the term “performative metalanguage”, and point to the numerous ways in which linguistic norms and styles may be negotiated, challenged and commented on through the linguistic practice, and in combination with straightforward commentary.