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By Root 597 0

as a language of official communication, and it remains a standing joke how poor politicians’ command of Kazakh tends to be. In central Asia, by contrast, there has been a discernible resurgence of national language use—and decline of Russian—among the political classes who were actually among the most prolific Russian speakers before independence.65 Here, as in the Baltics, English is growing in use as a second language.§ Only in Siberia, Rus’s oldest colony, can it be said that use of Russian is secure, and probably still gaining speakers. Sadly, this is because most of Siberia’s indigenous language communities are highly endangered, their traditional way of life shattered by the presence among them of large numbers of European Russians. They are too small, too isolated, and too weakened, to be able to envisage any future but collaboration with Russians.

Everywhere, use of Russian is more significant as a sign of feelings about the Soviet past, and of aspirations for the future, than as a practical choice of means of communication with the neighbours. Russian, even after the fall of communism, remains a highly ideological language.

Conclusions

There are four main reasons why an imperial language lives on after the dissolution of the empire that spread it.

The first is because it remains the language of the people who dissolve the empire. This can be called the creole reason. It was true of all the American colonies that fought and obtained independence from their mother countries in Europe: in every case, in the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, in Mexico, in the republics of Central and South America, and the kingdom of Brazil, the people who made the revolutions were not the indigenous people but the descendants of the European colonists, who were as attached to the metropolitan language as the mother country herself. Likewise it maintained Afrikaans in South Africa, and French in Canada and Algeria. In some sense, the settlers’ language communities have continued unbroken.

The second reason is because the newly independent countries want to retain a link, of trade or culture, perhaps even of defence, with the metropolitan power. This can be called the nostalgia reason. It is part of the reason why French has hung on in sub-Saharan Africa. It is also why there is still a trace of Spanish in the Philippines, and also why East Timor, independent in 2002, opted to continue—or rather resurrect—its use of Portuguese.

The second reason is often found in alliance with a third, which can be called the unity reason. A colonial power inevitably imposes a single language on a domain, which ends up being essential to maintaining it as a coherent unit. When the power changes, the language may change too (as for example it did when Spanish replaced both Nahuatl and Quechua in different dominions of the Spanish empire). But quite likely it does not, especially where there is no new conqueror but simply the culmination of a struggle for independence. In that case, the colonial language may linger on: this is another reason for the persistence of French in so many countries of sub-Saharan Africa: it just would not be practicable to administer Cameroon in any one of its 270-plus indigenous languages. And this is, perversely, why Malay was taken up as the unifying ‘Bahasa Indonesia’—by the Dutch just as much as the Indonesian government that followed them.

There is a fourth reason, the globality reason. A country may persist with an imperial language, not because it gives a link to the old colonial power, but because it provides a means to transcend it. This is very widely true of countries that maintain or adopt English in the current era; but it is just as truly the motive for the Russian elite’s adoption of French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The apparent failure of the Russian language to survive strongly where its speakers’ empire is no more can be viewed more clearly in the light of these four reasons.

The creole reason applies only in Siberia, since by and large it is only here that