Weekly wrap-up: Multilingualism is political
Browsing through the latest Communication Playbook (an internal newsletter for EU comms people), I found this super-interesting article by Hleb Liapeika on The Fix:
Many of those interested in languages may have known that the Russian language is widely used in countries around the Russian Federation - such as Ukraine and Belarus. Liapeika dives into the media landscapes of those two countries to take a closer look. And the numbers really do speak volumes:
"Since 2014, when a democratic revolution overthrew the pro-Russian government, Ukraine has been actively promoting the usage of its national language – both through laws and through the civil society. Things were slowly changing, and then changes rapidly accelerated with Russia’s open invasion in 2022.?According?to polls, 36% of Ukrainians were using the Russian language at home a year before the war broke out, with numbers in the South and the East being almost twice as high. After half a year of the full-scale war, this number?fell?to just 13%. More than half of people in previously majority-Russian-speaking regions now consider themselves bilingual."
The figures for Belarus are also impressive, but in a different way, as they highlight how little use is made (officially, at least) of the Belarusian language:
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According to?official statistics, only a tenth of school pupils study in Belarusian, and there is not a single university in the country with education entirely in the national language. In 2021, authorities liquidated hundreds of civil society organisations, including those working on promoting the Belarusian language: Union of Belarusian writers, PEN Belarus and others. State media are fully Russified, with just a few outlets in Belarusian.
I encourage you to read the full article to say how the developments play out in the media landscape. And how English is becoming part of the mix...
In other news
The European Parliament (including its translation service) has started its latest application round for five-month (paid) Schuman traineeships. At DG TRAD, we offer a whole host of interesting positions in translation, editing, audio, subtitling and more. Check out what we have and apply!