"The Russian Federation National Language Law" Research

The tendency of world globalization leads to worldwide cultural similarity and imitation. As a part of culture, powerful languages such as English, French, Russia do the same to the vulnerable languages. Hence, language diversity is facing challenges. According to the statistics of UNESCO, by the end of this century, more than half of the languages of the world will disappear. Native languages and characters are marks of different nations. Therefore, under the norm of maintaining the country’s unification and native languages’status, the nations have made a series of regulations and laws about languages to maintain their language rights and achieve cultural diversity.Russia has become a country of multi-ethnicity, multi-language during its long territorial expansion period. Soviet Union put forward the policy of "Russianization", languages such as Kazakh language and Tartar language were forced to use cyrillic alphabet. The survival situation of such ethnic languages were ignored. The accumulated ethnicity and language problems finally became the fuse of disintegration of USSR. After its disintegration, not only the former aligned republics carried out "de-russianization" policy one after another, but also the nations of Russia. This was manifested in the language aspect:the ethnic languages were loaded with heavy politics and power burden and demanded language independence. Under this circumstance, Russia and Republic of Tatarstan made Ethnic Language Law of Russian Federation and Ethnic Language Law of Republic of Tatarstanrespectively, which are meaningful to the protection of language diversity.Chapter One introduces the significance of this research, research methods and the research status, etc. Chapter Two discusses about the real needs (concerning ethnic groups and language) of Russia to enact this law and the theoretical basis. It is required to enact this law because of the variety of ethnic groups and languages in Russia, conflicts between Russian and other ethnic languages, conflicts between different ethnic languages and complicated conditions of ethnic groups and languages after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. As stipulated in the international law, all languages are equal and no discrimination is permitted. Moreover, many influential documents also help to make the language right acknowledged and valued. The language right is the theoretical basis of enactment of Ethnic Language Law of Russian Federation. Chapter Three mainly explain basic principles of this law, basic contents of and amendment to this law. Insisting that Russian should be the national language andadhering to the principle of equalitythis law protects languages of each ethnic group and guarantees the use of ethnic languages in education. It is made clear in this law that all languages are equal and can be used in any department, institution or occasion. Violation to this law shall be punished. Based on the analysis of implementation of Ethnic Language Law of Republic of Tatarstan, Chapter Four explores problems occurring during implementation, which can also describe the implementation of Ethnic Language Law of Russian Federation, and reaches a conclusion.Ethnic Language Law of Russian Federation is helpful to protect the variety of languages in Russia Federation, however, the implementation of which is not as good as expected. The existence of ethnic languages is still at risk and it is a long hard way to protect the variety of languages.