투르크메니스탄에서 러시아어의 지위변화

Abstract

Turkmenistan was one of the 15 federal republics of the USSR and became independent nation in 1991 year. During the Soviet era, very strong so-called "Russification policy" was introduced and propelled by the central authorities in Moscow and so usage of Russian language was increased. But now independent Turkmenistan is changing. It has been fundamentally restricted to use Russian language in Turkmenistan after independence of the country till the year of 2006. The government stipulated that Turkmen language only must be an official language and discriminated physically and spiritually against Russians who could not speak official language. This strict language policy caused massive migrations of Russians as other new independent republics of the former USSR and the number of Russian people is sharply reduced from 10% out of the population to 3-4%, which is approximately less than 100,000 people in the present. Russian language is one of the official languages of the United Nations and an international language whose speakers exceed one hundred million people. Education in Russian is popular throughout the world as one of the academic, scientific and cultural languages. Many of people in the former Soviet republics still use Russian language as well as their national languages. The former president Niyazov classified English as the first co-official language and Russian as the second but English is not actually used in the country. Turkmenistan recognized that it would be productive to cooperate with the Russian Federation in developing gas and transport industry and that Russian language would become a tremendous help in the development. Therefore, I believe that Russian language will be raised to higher status in Turkmenistan in the near future.