Russian Dropping

From the MT:

“Number of Russian Language Learners Worldwide Halved Since Soviet Collapse”

The number of people studying Russian worldwide has halved in the 30 years since the Soviet Union collapsed and is anticipated to decline further, according to state estimates cited by the RBC news website Thursday. Russian ranks as the world’s 10th-most widespread language with speakers in 27 countries, according to a report by the Higher Education Ministry’s subsidiary obtained by RBC. President Vladimir Putin has recently accused “cave-dwelling Russophobes” of attacking the language. The number of Russian language learners has fallen from 74.6 million in the early 1990s to 38.2 million in 2018, the ministry’s subsidiary, the Center for Scientific Research, said. “If nothing is done, the situation may become tragic by 2025,” co-author Alexander Arefyev told RBC. According to the cited research, the number of students learning Russian outside ex-U.S.S.R. republics fell from 20 million to a little over 1 million.  The research center forecasts the total number of Russian speakers worldwide to decline from 243 million in 2015 to 215 million in 2025. However, the number of Russian speakers in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has collectively increased from 1.2 million to 4 million between 1990 and 2015, RBC reported. Putin has wielded the Russian language as a form of soft power. In widely shared remarks during a Kremlin meeting this month, he called for an electronic version of the Great Russian Encyclopedia to replace Wikipedia.  “I am telling you quite seriously that in the countries with which economic and political cooperation has begun to revive, there is a surge in interest in the Russian language,” he had said. Russia has long accused its ex-Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe of discriminating against Russian speakers and the language.

^ It doesn’t surprise me in the least that the number of Russian-speakers outside of the former USSR has decreased so much since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Until 1991 the majority of Russian Language speakers were either ethnic Russians or non-ethnic Russians forced to learn and use Russian (both inside the USSR and in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.) Once people could freely learn and use their native language they switched from Russian to their native language. The same for learning and using Russian as a foreign language – once it was no longer mandatory people around the world switched from Russian as a foreign language to English (which is the International Language.) The only reason that Russian is used so much in the US, Canada, etc. today is because of all the immigrants that moved to those places from the former USSR. I heard more Russian used in Munich, Germany, in Brighton Beach, NY, USA, Limassol, Cyprus and in Tel Aviv, Israel than I did when I lived in Russia – not really but it was a lot in those other places.  ^

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/11/28/number-of-russian-language-learners-worldwide-halved-since-soviet-collapse-a68357