Sebastian Muth

War, language removal and self-identification in the linguistic landscapes of Nagorno-Karabakh

The disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) resulted in demographic shifts and drew new boundaries in a once borderless region. The South Caucasus, an area that has been characterized by its linguistic diversity witnessed one of the most destructive interethnic wars in the former USSR. Fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, it resulted in the removal of the Azerbaijani population. Two decades later the political status of the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic remains unresolved, but apparently a new linguistic self-identity of the population takes shape. While possibilities for extensive sociolinguistic research are limited, linguistic landscape research provides insights into patterns of individual and public language use. This paper analyzes the linguistic landscapes of Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, and establishes functional domains of the languages visible. Furthermore, it traces remnants of an Azerbaijani linguistic landscape in abandoned settlements and documents patterns of language use in rural parts of the territory. The demographic situation suggests a majority of Armenians, yet the results point toward a bilingual situation with Russian as a language of wider communication. On the other hand, the study shows the link between the removal of Azerbaijani from the public sphere and the eradication of Azerbaijani culture.

Russian as a commodity: medical tourism and the healthcare industry in post-Soviet Lithuania

ABSTRACT The focus of this paper is on Lithuania, where government policies continue to limit the use of Russian in education, the public space and the media, while the local economy has recognized proficiency in Russian as a commodity. This is particularly salient in the healthcare industry that grew significantly in the past years with patients from post-Soviet countries seeking treatment at local hospitals and private clinics. Marketed for their ‘European’ standards and competitive prices, promotional discourses refer to proficiency in Russian and familiarity with Russian culture and customs among medical staff. This commodification of Russian challenges perceptions on the value of language in the formation of political and cultural identities, pointing towards a paradigmatic shift and renegotiation of language attitudes in countries of the former USSR.

Informal signs as expressions of multilingualism in Chisinau: how individuals shape the public space of a post-Soviet capital

Abstract Informal and transient displays of written language such as graffiti, announcements and notes attached to walls and lampposts form an integral part of an urban linguistic landscape. Especially within multilingual contexts, individuals constantly shape the public space by the languages they use and make language choices that do not always reflect official language policies, commonly held perceptions or the demographic makeup within a certain area. The capital of the Republic of Moldova, Chisinau, proves to be an interesting area of research here, as – apart from a Romanian-speaking majority – the city is home to a large share of speakers of Russian, a language long considered to be the lingua franca of the country. The aim of the current study is to analyse signs made by private individuals that are not part of shop fronts or billboards, namely those that are found all over the city and advertise for language courses, work opportunities abroad or express political opinions. The quantitative basis of the study is made up of two corpora with over 750 different items from various parts of Chisinau surveyed in 2009 and 2010 both in the centre of the city as well as in suburban residential areas. For better traceability and to ensure transparency in linguistic landscape analysis, the 2010 corpus is accessible online. The survey shows that Russian is widely used as a local lingua franca, contradicting official policies that declare Romanian Moldovan the sole national language.

Ethnicity, nationalism and conflict in the South Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh and the legacy of Soviet nationalities policy

again. The focus of the story then becomes the dynamic of Muslims (and Serbs after they were “rehabilitated” as Croatian Orthodox) trying to find their place in a Croatian state. From that point on, Greble describes undercurrents in Sarajevo among the various national/religious groups that can be felt even today. Despite the destructive Bosnian war of the early 1990s, which put Sarajevo’s citizens (of all religions) under siege for more than 1400 days, many Sarajlije still express their sense of “civic community,” their belief that Sarajevo is a special city with special civic values. They still believe, as Greble expressed in the pages of her book, that their problems can and should be handled “in house,” not by outsiders, whether Germans or Ustashe in the mid-twentieth century, or the European Union today. She writes that “the city’s codes of civility and neighborliness carried on” (117) during the dark days of World War II, at least for some of its citizens. We can also hear similar testimony today about the responses of many of Sarajevo’s citizens to the depredations of the siege at the end of the twentieth century. There are also parallels with the despair of World War II-era leaders of Sarajevo’s national/religious groups at the destruction of these codes of civility with the onslaught of rural refugees, who never knew and could not appreciate these codes. We see similar expressions of despair today, as Sarajevo has been transformed at the beginning of the twenty-first century by an influx of refugees from “the last war.” Thus, Greble’s descriptions and conclusions regarding a historical period can easily apply today, in many ways, to contemporary Sarajevo. Those who have visited Sarajevo will recognize its charm in this book. Those who have studied Bosnian politics, culture, and society will also recognize, in this book, the interconnectedness of Sarajevo’s civic and confessional identities of both yesterday and today. As during the mid-twentieth century, so also today, Sarajevo’s politics pits the three major groups (Serb Orthodox, Croat Catholic, and Muslim) against each other. However, Greble argues that we cannot really understand the dynamic if we use a nation-centric model. Instead, she insists that a new model for framing war and people’s responses to it must de-emphasize ethnic conflict (today’s wrong-headed emphasis on ancient ethnic hatreds, too, might fall into this category) and the dichotomy between collaboration and resistance. She favors an examination of local dynamics and motivations of elites and citizens faced with life and death situations. Emily Greble’s Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe is a lesson in how painstaking research and excellent use of primary sources and documents can provide us a better understanding of both historical and contemporary processes and events.

The commodification of Russian around the world

This special issue is dedicated to the commodification of Russian – the language whose global sociolinguistic behavior had been increasingly attracting scholarly attention (Isurin 2011; Laitin 1998; Pavlenko 2008; Ryazanova-Clarke 2014). When the disintegration of the Soviet Union became imminent in the early 1990s, a collection of papers on this subject would have been highly unusual. In fact, following the breakup of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, sociologists and historians alike would have hardly predicted that in the years to come, Russian would emerge as a global language with an inherent commercial value. This came as evenmore of a surprise given that throughout the 1990s the Russian economy was in decline, politically motivated derussification took place in many successor states of the former Soviet empire, limiting the use of the former Soviet lingua franca in virtually all domains, the status of Russian as a second or foreign language declined and geopolitical constellations ensuring Russia’s influence abroad were on the wane. All this changed since the turn of the century as the Russian economy enjoyed unprecedented economic growth, the country became one of the top investors of capital around the world (Myant and Drahokoupil 2011; Panibratov 2012) and a popular place for work migrants from many post-Soviet countries (Federal’naia Migratsionnaia Sluzhba 2012; Zadorin 2008). Suddenly the Russian language emerged as a truly global phenomenon responding to the demand created by the rapidly growing Russian wealthy classes who were keen to bank, shop, get medical treatment and educate their children abroad, and by the sways of Russian mass tourism transforming places from the streets of London and Milan to the beaches of Thailand and Vietnam. Following the flow of Russian capital, the Russian language arrived in many European countries and further afield affecting linguistic landscapes, service sector and the language teaching industry in the new locations. The study of Russian as a commodity taps into the field of enquiry in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that emerged along with the onset of the age of late capitalism and globalization (Giddens 1991; Harvey 1989; Holborow 2015; Pujolar 2007), and that shares the view that languages and speakers may be vested with an inherent exchange value on the global marketplace. Contemporary discussion of language commodification advances that in the global neo-liberal capitalism the link between language, territory and political, cultural and national identities – something that was posited by the major ideologies of language in modern period – becomes disconnected (Duchêne 2009; Park 2011; Urciuoli 2008). To describe this shift in linguistic perceptions, Heller and Duchene propose the contrasting notions of ‘pride’ and ‘profit’ as they discuss the conditions under which language is recast from being framed in political or national terms, to being understood as a manifestation of capital (Heller and Duchêne 2012).

Language Removal, Commodification and the Negotiation of Cultural Identity in Nagorno-Karabakh

Amidst the disintegration of the USSR, the spatial representation of ethnic groups and their language in public spaces emerged as defining expressions of statehood and belonging to a particular cultural sphere. This led to tensions along ethnic lines in many parts of the former Soviet Union (cf. Hirsch, 2005; King, 2010; Snyder, 2003), highlighting anomalies of early Soviet nation-building and the rise of nationalist movements. The decline and eventual breakup of the Soviet Union resulted in the formation of 15 new nation states and a number of de facto sovereign political entities with varying degrees of national cohesion, political stability and international recognition. Together with eroding central power structures, economic stagnation and political mobilization along the lines of ethnicity, religion and language, territorial conflicts on the fringes of the USSR surfaced, challenging early Soviet policies of nationalization and indigenization (cf. Hirsch, 2005). During this decade of political and ideological uncertainties that began with the rise of Soviet first secretary Gorbachev and reached culmination in the early 1990s, territories such as Chechnya, Ingushetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia became battle grounds of ideological, religious and ethnic contestation (Barbashin, 2008; Coene, 2010; King, 2008). Especially, the conflict over the Autonomous Oblast of Nagorno-Karabakh, located within Azerbaijan but with an ethnic Armenian majority population, became an epitome for interethnic violence in the final days of the Soviet Union. The conflict lasted from 1988 until 1994 and resulted in the death of 30,000, an Armenian victory and the expulsion of the ethnic Azerbaijani minority. Today, Nagorno-Karabakh is an internationally not recognized political entity, backed by neighboring Armenia and the Armenian diaspora in the former Soviet Union, the Americas, the Middle East and Europe.

Linguistic landscapes on the other side of the border: signs, language and the construction of cultural identity in Transnistria

Abstract In 1992, Transnistria emerged as a de facto independent political entity, not recognized internationally. Russian emerged as a strong marker of a distinct cultural and political identity and as a powerful tool of separation from Moldova. Officially, Transnistria is trilingual in Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian (Moldovan) written in Cyrillic script, yet Russian is the language of choice for most inhabitants. This article presents a linguistic landscape study that sheds light on language use by institutional and private actors in Transnistria, exemplified by signs in the republics mainly Russian-speaking capital Tiraspol.

RUSSIAN LANGUAGE ABROAD: VIEWING LANGUAGE THROUGH THE LENS OF COMMODIFICATION

After a successful 2-volume issue on discourse analysis (Ponton, Larina 2016, 2017) we are happy to offer the readers of Russian Journal of Linguistics another special issue this time dedicated to a new sociolinguistic topic — commodification of language. We will discuss what language commodification is, focus on its antecedents and methods of study and consider commodification of the Russian language in different countries — Lithuania, India, China, Israel, Spain, Norway, Finland and Bulgaria. All the contribu-tions document the historical moment when Russian became one of the most popular languages in the international service industry within the framework of transnational leisure- and shopping tourism. Furthermore, the contributions to this special issue un-derscore how geopolitical, economic, social, and demographic factors influence processes of commodification and decomodification of the language. Viewed from the economic perspective, these essays draw attention to motivations behind attempts to turn Russian into a ‘valuable’ communicative resource. Finally, the papers explicitly or implicitly investigate the role of teaching and learning Russian as part of the language commodi-fication, revealing how state and corporate policies promote the learning of Russian and boost individual motivation to acquire proficiency in Russian in order to meet mar-ket-driven demand that calls for the linguistic accommodation of Russian-speaking tourists.