Translated material
Empty conversations. Could the Russian language disappear?
In recent years, in the world, Russia's attempts have been discussing Russia's attempts to regain international influence lost with the collapse of the USSR. The revival of the military-industrial complex and the participation of the Russian military in foreign conflicts is not limited. At the beginning of summer, the British PR Agency Portland first placed Russia in the top 30 leaders in the Soft Power category, in which the weapon in value is inferior to the values of civil society and its culture.
An important carrier and at the same time indicator of this soft force is the language. But here Russia's successes leave much to be desired. The popularity of the Russian language is “very multifaceted”, in the recent expression of the press secretary of President Dmitry Peskov, melts in the world from year to year, and it seems that this process gradually gets out of control. How bad is everything?
How many people say in Russian?
According to Ethnologue, there are more than 200 million people today. According to the estimates of the Center for Social Units of the Ministry of Education and Science, it is more correct to talk about 260 million, which in any case is significantly less than before the collapse of the USSR.
During the Cold War, the Soviet academician Viktor Vinogradov totaled up to half a billion residents of the planet who speak Russian. The number, as later studies showed, was typically Soviet embellishment of reality. Nevertheless, the international popularity of the Russian language at that time grew, although in many republics of the USSR itself it was rather colonial and was planted with communist ideology, said American researcher Joseph Weber. In the late Soviet period, Russian, according to UNESCO, owned about 285 million inhabitants of the planet. But with the collapse of the Union, it began that the journalists of the Economist publication in the book “The World in 2050” were proclaimed the global “retreat” of the Russian language.
In Russia itself, however, they are convinced that the Russian language is in great form, in spite of everything. The Russians own 300 million people, they said at the V-World Assembly of the Russian World (2011), or “Third billion”, as Alexander Prokhorenko, the head of the Committee on External Relations of the City Hall of St. Petersburg (venue for the World Congress of Compatriots), was expressed . Then the president of St. Petersburg State University and at the same time the head of the International Association of Teachers of the Russian Language and Literature Lyudmila Verbitskaya (who later headed the Russian Academy of Education) undertook to say that “the Russian language has already known half a million people”-about the same (495 million), as, according to the Servantes Institute , in the world says in the world. With the latter, Verbitskaya, however, does not agree. “Spanish is now followed by Russians,” she announced triumphantly.
Meanwhile, even foreign linguists who vigorously propagate the Russian language-such as Ben Rifkin from the New Jersey college, are not inclined to exaggerate the scale of its spread in the world, numbering 270 million Russian-speakers at best.
How many people will speak Russian?
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