Belarusians are experiencing a new wave of Russification as Moscow expands its economic, political and cultural dominance to overtake the identity of its neighbor.

When school started this year for Mikalay in Belarus, the 15-year-old discovered that his teachers and administrators no longer called him by that name. Instead, they referred to him as Nikolai, its Russian equivalent.

What’s more, classes at his school — one of the country’s best — are now taught in Russian, not Belarusian, which he has spoken for most of his life.

Belarusians like Mikalay are experiencing a new wave of Russification as Moscow expands its economic, political and cultural dominance to overtake the identity of its neighbor.

It’s not the first time. Russia under the czars and in the era of the Soviet Union imposed its language, symbols and cultural institutions on Belarus. But with the demise of the USSR in 1991, the country began to assert its identity, and Belarusian briefly became the official language, with the white-red-white national flag replacing a version of the red hammer and sickle.

  • JustEnoughDucksEnglish
    9•4 days ago

    Oof, France has been committing genocide for hundreds of years then lol.

    It has been trying to eradicate all regional languages outside of Parisian France for a long time now and still refuses to sign the European Charter for Minority and Regional Languages. Only recently did they start recognizing them and not banning the use of them.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France

    https://guides.loc.gov/french-literature-and-language-learning/regional-minority-languages-france

    • @[email protected]English
      3•3 days ago

      France’s historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it’s much of an improvement.

      And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it’s stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn’t call it oppression.

      So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow’s erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn’t make it unimportant.

      • JustEnoughDucksEnglish
        4•4 days ago

        I mean China definitely does it.

        Tibeten “re-education” anyone? They stole the playbook for Tibet right from america dealing with native Americans, but with a little less outright killing. Uyghurs is less language genocide and more actual genocide and concentration/slave camps.

        America did it and does it with native americans. Americans did it with literally every single group that came into the country with their whole “English isn’t our official language but you better speak English or be ostracized” through its history.

        Literally every nation has tried at one point.

        I am pretty sure language erasure is not “a form of genocide”, but “a component of recognizing genocide” or something that states thag commit genocide commonly do. I have looked at a bunch of definitions and genocide definition seems to always involve actually killing people:

        any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

        (a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[3]

        My point was that every nation does it simply because of nationalism and ease of administration. Governments already run bad enough without having to keep 25 running translations of every document.