January 2005

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TATAR LANGUAGE WILL CONTINUE TO BE WRITTEN THROUGH THE CYRILLIC ALPHABET (RFE/RL Newsline)

January 2005 – The Tatar Supreme Court decided on 28 December 2004 to overturn a 1999 Tatar law adopting the Latin script for the Tatar language. Such decision corresponds to a ruling of the Russian Constitutional Court from 16 November which upheld the constitutionality of a federal law requiring that the written forms of all national languages in the Russian Federation be based on the Cyrillic alphabet. Nonetheless, as reported by RFE/RL Newsline, the European Court of Human Rights has accepted for consideration an appeal against such ruling.

In accordance with the Constitutional Court, the Federal Law on the Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation, amended in 2002, establishes that each republic within the Federation may choose its own state language, but the use of the Cyrillic alphabet for all official languages is mandatory. The Court ruled that only federal-level legislators have the right to decide such linguistic matters and that by introducing the use of another script without special permission from the federal legislative bodies Tatarstan risked threatening the linguistic integrity of the Russian Federation, RFE/RL Newsline reported.

The origin of such ruling was an appeal filed by the Tatarstan State Council (parliament) and the Tatarstan Supreme Court, which argue that the Russian federal law on languages runs counter to the Constitution. One argument for the introduction of a script reform is that the Latin alphabet is more suited than the Cyrillic alphabet for transliterating the sounds of the Tatar language (a Turkic language). By contrary, prominent Tatar diaspora members sustain that such reform poses a threat to the unity and integrity of the Tatar people, as, according to them, the transition to a Latin script would not increase but lessen interest in the Tatar language. (For further information, see Mercator-Legislation’s News: July and February 2002.)

Furthermore, the Russian Constitutional Court also ruled in November in favour of bilingual teaching in kindergarten and general primary and secondary schools, as the Law of the Tatarstan Republic on Education was examined. In accordance with the court, the republics in the Russian Federation may introduce the teaching of non-Russian state languages to the same extent as Russian.