Belarus: A Chinese Solution?

Bezviz, or the European Union’s visa waver program extended to Ukraine a year ago in June 2017, must have angered the autocratic regimes in neighboring Belarus and Russia. Why would Ukrainians, who had just lost Crimea and were unable to stop the Russian incursion in the east of their country, be allowed to enjoy Rome or Paris without having to face the indignity of applying for a Schengen visa? The Eiffel Tower, the Sistine Chapel, or the Canaries can hardly be successfully replaced with the likes of Sochi, the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, or the Crimean seacoast stricken by the dearth of water. Neither are the Kuril Islands, known for their balmy climate conducive to all-year-round holidaying. To the average Belarusian and Russian the west inexplicably rewarded Ukraine for the military losses suffered with the privilege that should first be accorded to Russians or Belarusians.

Lukashenka and Xi in 2013

Minority Language Protection Legislation: A Sobering Note

Perspectives on preserving the use of languages that are not official in a given state are limited. Nowadays, each state is a culturally and linguistically homogenizing polity, especially the nation-states in central Europe and in east and southeast Asia that are ethnolinguistic in their character. Communities that speak (and sometimes write) minority, regional and other non-official languages have two basic options of preserving their languages. First, they can make sure to stay isolated from the homogenizing state’s structures and institutions, especially from schools. Compulsory universal elementary education teaches (in other words, imposes) the official language to successive generations of children, ensuring that minority groups’ children are compelled to un-learn their community languages. Another possibility open to minority groups for preserving their languages is a struggle for their own autonomous or fully independent ethnolinguistic nation-states. None of these two options is appealing. The latter entails violence and even bloodshed, while the former means conscious disengagement from advantages (alongside disadvantages) of modernity. Hence, unless the strictures of the current legitimating model of modern statehood (that is, the homogenizing in its nature nation-state) are dramatically altered, then each of the still surviving non-state languages will become endangered in the span of three to five generations.

Bulgaria: Between [a], [u], or Maybe [ı]?

Transliteration from one script to another is always fraught with the danger of ambiguity. Oftentimes a reader knowing both scripts and languages written in them is unable on the basis of a transliterated text alone to faithfully reproduce a word, title or sentence in the original script. It is so because the equivalence between graphemes (letters) in different scripts is usually established on the basis of the same or similar phoneme which a letter designates in the source language written script A and another in the target language written in script B.

Cultural and Linguistic Imperialism Redux: Online Inequality (4)

Online language resources inequality: Languages in which the Google Translate service is available

Sources:

Google Translate: Supported Languages. 2017. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate#Supported_languages. Accessed: Dec 26, 2017.

Google Translate: Languages. 2017. https://translate.google.com/intl/en/about/languages/. Accessed: Dec 26, 2017.

The Ethiopian Nation-State: Between the German Empire and Austria-Hungary

Like many nation-states outside Europe, Ethiopia adopted a western model of modernization for its present-day nation-state. The difference is that the vast majority of such non-western polities used to be colonies of western powers. Hence, such states were formed as colonies and a given model of statehood  was imposed on them. When decolonization took place and the former colonies gained independence, the imposed model of statehood was usually retained.

The story of modern Ethiopia is different. It was the ruling Ethiopian elite themselves who selected a model of ‘modern’ statehood for their polity.

Today’s federal Ethiopia of autonomous ethnonational territories

Cultural and Linguistic Imperialism Redux: Online Inequality Observed Through the Lens of the Wikipedias (3)

Continental density of Wikipedias’ articles: Number of Wikipedias’ articles per 100 million inhabitants

Sources: List of Continents by Population. 2017. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_population. Accessed: Dec 16, 2017.

List of Wikipedias by language group. 2017. Wikimedia: Meat-Wiki. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias_by_language_group. Accessed: Dec 16, 2017.

Cultural and Linguistic Imperialism Redux: Online Inequality Observed Through the Lens of the Wikipedias (2)

Continental density of Wikipedias: Number of Wikipedias per 100 million inhabitants

Sources: List of Continents by Population. 2017. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_population. Accessed: Dec 16, 2017.

List of Wikipedias by language group. 2017. Wikimedia: Meat-Wiki. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias_by_language_group. Accessed: Dec 16, 2017.

Continent	Population (2016)	Number of Wikipedias (2017)	Density: One (1) Wikipedias per millions of inhabitants	Density: Number of Wikipedias per 100 million inhabitants
Africa	1,216,130,000	42	29 million	3.4
America, North	579,024,000	13	44.5 million	2.2
America, South	422,535,000	8	53 million	1.9
Asia	4,462, 677,000	91	49 million	2
Australia and Oceania	40,117,000	15	2.7 million	37
Europe	741,448,000	135	5.5 million	24.5

Cultural and Linguistic Imperialism Redux: Online Inequality Observed Through the Lens of the Wikipedias (1)

Density of Wikipedia’s in a continent’s native languages per continent

NB: Underlining denotes that a language is native to two continents, hence the Wikipedia in such a language is counted twice

Source: List of Wikipedias by language group. 2017. Wikimedia: Meat-Wiki. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias_by_language_group. Accessed: Dec 16, 2017.

Russian: Between Re-Ethnicization and Pluricentrism

Languages in Today’s Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine

In June 2017 I visited the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and two months later Riga and Tallinn, respectively, the capitals of Latvia and Estonia. I was surprised how differently these states deal with the post-Soviet legacy of the Russian language.

In Ukraine almost a third of the population prefer to speak Russian. But it is genetically close to Ukrainian, so Ukrainian-speakers can to a degree understand Russian without having acquired this language in a formal setting. It is possible to have a meaningful conversation with one interlocutor speaking Ukrainian and the other replying in Russian. What often prevents this kind of ‘suprastandard bilingualism’ (as the phenomenon was known among Czech- and Slovak-speakers in former Czechoslovakia) is a deep-seated unwillingness on the part of Russophones to make an effort to comprehend Ukrainian. It is not a matter of language, but of the imperial legacy, namely, a prejudice that Russian is somehow inherently ‘better,’ ‘more cultured and civilized’ than the ‘peasant lingo’ of Ukrainian.

PC menu withe the choice between Cyrillic- and Latin alphabet-based Serbian

The Reincarnation

The clacking and end-of-line rings of the old-fashioned typewriters were mixing with the aroma of freshly brewed tea. Head of Division savored this moment of the day. All was in perfect harmony. He had not been called to any emergency in the small hours. Rather than purposefully shuttling all the night between places of trouble in the ministry’s tale-telling black cars with dark-tinted windows, today he took a leisurely subway ride to work. In nondescript clothes, he enjoyed the din and bustle. The waiting in a long line at the station in the cramped space clearly delineated by the meandering and unyielding stainless steel barriers. The crush of human bodies pressed into place by uniformed orderlies wearing once white gloves. And in a rare moment, a sudden olfactory miracle of a high-quality women’s perfume cut through the stolid landscape of everyday sweat. An energizing stab straight into his nostrils. He inhaled deeply.[1]

[1] I thank Catherine Gibson for her helpful comments and advice.

Godzilla