Re: Moscou veut soutenir le rayonnement de la langue russe

In article <1137684870.520687.282880@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"santaka13@xxxxxxxxx" <santaka13@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<deletions>

> Le constat de départ est clair : au moment de la chute de l'Union
soviétique, > 286 millions de personnes utilisaient le russe comme langue
officielle, et
> aujourd'hui, sur les 140 millions de personnes habitant dans les ex-
> Républiques soviétiques (hors Russie), 100 milions seulement parlent le
russe. > D'après les experts, d'ici à dix ans, ils seront moitié moins.
L'exemple de la > Lituanie est éloquent : 80 % des personnes adultes
maîtrisent le russe, contre > seulement 13 % des moins de 15 ans.

<deletions>

Young Lithuanians are not likely to have any enthusiasm for Russia unless
Russia comes up with something that can sustain their interest. Plugging
Russian grammar, watching Chekhov plays, and reading Dostoyevsky are not
going to appeal to the average early teen in the way Walt Disney, Harry
Potter, and video games do. This is unfortunate for Lithuania, since
Russian is the native language of her neighbors to the west, most of the
south, and east, as well as of several trainloads of people who cross the
country every day. Additionally, adult Lithuanians generally use Russian
to converse with their Latvian and Estonian neighbors to the north, even
if that situation will change in favor of English for the next
generations. In any case, Russian is not just a post-imperial relict for
Lithuania, but rather a language a mastery of which will continue to have,
among other things, important implications for Lithuanian state security,
given the neighborhood.

The fundamentals of languages like Russian with complex inflectional,
phonological, and orthographic systems are best learned semi-intuitively
by pre-teens; full mastery is almost impossible to attain if study is
begun in adulthood. It appears obvious that even if Russia has no
equivalent of Walt Disney or Harry Potter, it is in Lithuania's own
interest to encourage more young people to acquire at least the
fundamentals of Russian at a young age. Then they will at least have a
foundation to build on if they decide later on in life that mastery of
Russian will be part of their professional competence.

Regards,
Eugene Holman
.

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