Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

By a happy coincidence, during the reign of Napoleon III, 1852-70, the regime was even known as le second Empire.

The Belgians, relying much more on foreign expertise to run their empire, also made less use of French as a pervasive language of administration. As in the British colonies, there was widespread use of any pre-existing lingua franca, notably Swahili and Lingala.

Article 2 of the constitution: ’la langue de la République est le français’. This is then given effect by the law of 4 August 1994, ’la langue de l’ enseignement est le français’ (implemented in article L. 121-3 of the Code de l’Éducation).

In our Romanisation of Russian, y has the value of English y in yet (often attached as a superscript to a consonant, showing that it is palatalised); ï represents a vowel not known in standard English: it is like the vowel i with the body of the tongue drawn back, which can be heard for instance in the Scottish pronunciation of the word dirk; ë, as in Cyrillic spelling, is pronounced yo as in ‘yob’. The acute accent, ’, marks a heavy stress, and o when it is not stressed sounds more like a. In older Russian, the letter is transcribed ė, since it seems to have represented a more closed e sound, like E in the local pronunciation of ‘Edinburgh’, or é in French été.

The name is a Latinisation of Rus y , first heard of in the ninth century. Its origins are obscure (and discussed in Franklin and Shepard 1996: 27-32). But the Finnish name for Swedes is Ruotsi (perhaps originally meaning ‘oarsmen’); and the first recorded use of the term (as Rhōs , through Greek) is the Bertinian Annals’ account of a visit to a Frankish court in 839, of ‘certain men who said they were called Rhos, and that their king, known as chacanus [i.e. khagan - a Turkic title!] had despatched them… The Emperor [Louis—he of the Strasburg Oaths; see Chapter 8]… discovered that they were Swedes by origin.’ But a contemporary source, the Arabic Book of Routes and Kingdoms ( c. 846), tells us: ‘The Rūs are a tribe of Slavs. They bring furs of beavers and black foxes…’ (Milner-Gulland 1997: 53-5). There is also a small river called the Ros y, which flows into the Dnieper just south of Kiev.

The Russian for Orthodox, pravoslavnïi , is a loan translation from the Greek. But tellingly, this word could as well be analysed to mean ‘truly Slav’ or indeed ‘rightly glorious’.

Barraclough (1978: 209, 230). In the early twentieth century there were substantial flows into Turkestan too, sometimes provoking large-scale departures of the locals eastward into China (Hosking 1997: 389-90). Later on, especially under Stalin, these flows were augmented by deliberate enforced deportations en masse, ostensibly for security, reminiscent of Tiglath Pileser and his successors in the Assyrian empire (see Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 64). But the populations then deported into Kazakhstan and Siberia typically spoke languages other than Russian: 200,000 Turkic-speaking Tatars from the Crimea, 1.8 million Germans from the Volga. Some, like the Chechen-Ingush, Kabard-Balkar and Kalmyk, were later allowed to return. But there are even now 300,000 Koreans in modern Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (Dalby 1998: 616, 223, 329; Comrie 1981: 30).

Compare what happens to t and d in British English before long u: the words tune and dune are pronounced [t yūn] and [d yūn] in careful speech, but affricated to [tšūn] and [dzucar;ūn] in everyday pronunciation.

A Varangian fortress on the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea: evidently the falcons were trying to beat a path far to the east of Kiev.

The old title knyaz y , ‘prince’, is likewise a borrowing of a Western term: it is the Russian reworking of the old Germanic title kuningas , literally ‘man of birth’, which is also the origin of English king.

Kozak (in Crimean Tatar, Chagatay Turkic) means ‘free man, wanderer, bandit’. In other Turkic languages (e.g. Kïrgïz, Azeri, Bashkir) the word kazak, qazaq has meanings such as ‘independent man’ or ‘seeker of adventures’. All are derived from old the Turkic verb kez- , ‘walk, wander, travel’.

These of course were not the only Slavic-language groups of central Europe. But the others, among them the Wends, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Serbs, Bosnians and Croats, were never available for incorporation into early modern Russia. Their languages, like Polish, were not mutually intelligible with Russian; and their peoples were firmly held within the bounds of other empires.

In the census of 1897, the Ukrainians would constitute 18 per cent, the rest of the Russians 44 per cent.

Much later, in 1944, after Nazi atrocities in the region, Stalin deported the remaining 190,000 Crimean Tatars en masse to central Asia. In the 1990s about 50,000 of them returned (Dalby 1998: 616).

The word Kazakh has the same Turkic etymology as Cossack; but here it refers to a real Turkic tribe of nomads, closely related to the Kyrgyz.

The Bible was actually available in Kalmyk and Tatar (not to mention Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian and Georgian) half a century before it came out in Russian. Publication of the Russian Bible could not be authorised until 1876, by chance just after the first Russian edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Hosking 1997: 138-42, 233-4).

In 1994, there were 436,600 Russians in Estonia, comprising 29.0 per cent of the total population; in Latvia, there were 849,000, 33.1 per cent. Meanwhile, in Lithuania, the Russian population stood at 316,000, just 8.5 per cent ( Europa World Yearbook , 1995).

A May 1995 referendum granted Russian the status of an official language, along with Belarusian. Russian is the language of instruction in virtually all university departments in Belarus. And whereas in 1994 220 schools in Minsk, the capital city, had taught in Belarusian, two years later under twenty did so.

At high cost, but with dubious symbolism, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, speaking Turkic languages, all converted their alphabets back from Cyrillic to Latin in the decade after independence. But each system is a little different, and none has adopted Turkey’s own spelling conventions of 1928.

Another Germanic language, Norse, was also being taken far afield by its speakers in the latter centuries of this millennium: the Normans took it to Normandy, the Varangians to Rus, the Vikings to England, Scotland, Ireland and Iceland. In every case but one, they gave up their own language for that of the people with whom they settled: the only exception was in Iceland, where the Norse settlers found that they were the first human beings to arrive.

The decisive battle on a frozen Lake Peipus, in Livonia, was memorably conceived on film by Sergei Eisenstein.