The Russian language in the multi-ethnic regions of Southern Russia in expert narratives: the societal dimension

The relevance of the article’s topic is explained by contemporary geopolitical challenges to the consolidation of Russian multi-ethnic and multi-confessional society, on the one hand, and the insufficiently high symbolic value of the achieved Russian–national bilingualism as a crucial mechanism for this consolidation, on the other. The methodological basis of the study is T. Parsons’ concept of the societal subsystem of society and the constructivist approach to language developed by V. Tishkov. The article is based on the results of analyzing in-depth interviews with representatives of the expert community involved in the implementation and evaluation of language policy in four republics of Southern Russia (Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygea, Dagestan, and Kalmykia). Their populations are characterized by multi-ethnic composition, varying qualitative states of national languages, and simultaneously, the widespread use of the Russian language. It was revealed that all experts recognize the pragmatic functions of the Russian language and, above all, its function as a lingua franca for intercultural communication in a multi-ethnic environment; the dominant role of the Russian language in all spheres of socio-economic life; the prevalence of the Russian language in communication among the youth of all nationalities in the republics under consideration; and the population’s perception of the expansion of the Russian language’s function to a societal scale. Nevertheless, the dominant narrative for the majority of experts is concern about the state of national languages, their narrowed reproduction, and lack of competitiveness in everyday life. At the same time, the role of the Russian language is not reflected upon by most experts in the context of ensuring a unified civilizational space for Russia. The stereotypical perception of the Russian language as a lingua franca obscures the historical result – the achieved binary ethnic identity for the vast majority of the population of Southern Russia. This became possible due to the semantic commonality of the languages of the peoples of Russia, which reflects the commonality of cultures of Russian peoples and manifested itself through the role of the Russian language in the development of national languages. This role can be defined as societal. Without its conscious cultivation, the identificational function of the Russian language narrows and is reduced to constructing the political (civil) aspect of Russian identity, which reproduces the differentiation of an individual’s identity into ethnic as “internal,” “native,” and civic (Russian) as “external.”