The great and mighty Russian language with translation into Tajik: why signs in the metro were redesigned

Irina Mishina

Not a crime committed by migrants, not their mass brawl, but a simple inscription in Tajik (Farsi) and Uzbek blew up Russian society. A petition has already been posted on the Internet addressed to the Moscow Mayor's Office: " We demand to return the old design of the plates on the doors of the Moscow metro and remove the inscriptions in the Tajik and Uzbek languages!"

The problem is that any people and any country are interested in preserving a single cultural space. Language is perhaps the most important component of this cultural space. With its help, the unity of the people, the unity of the territory, the unity of the nation are preserved. That is why any people perceive the encroachment on their native language painfully, almost as an invasion of the enemy on their territory.

From comments in social networks.

Lika Ionkina: "Soon the Russians will become a minority, and in Russian it will be written at the bottom, and in Tajik and Uzbek at the top, as for the titular nations".

Izya Shlemovich: “Our tolerance knows no meaningful boundaries...”.

A flurry of emotions overwhelmed Muscovites so much that the Moscow Department of Transport was forced to come up with explanations. Their essence boiled down to the fact that the inscriptions on the signs of the Prokshino and Lesoparkovaya stations of the Sokolnicheskaya and Butovskaya lines of the Moscow metro were duplicated in Tajik (Farsi) and Uzbek in order to make it easier for migrants to travel in this area.

The press service of the Department of Transport explained that buses run from these stations to the migration center located in Sakharovo near Moscow. “Our task is to make the metro understandable and comfortable for different passengers. For example, the metro map on the electronic board in the carriages is duplicated in nine languages”, - the department noted.

This raises a logical question: what about the law, according to which labor migrants from the CIS countries, upon arrival in Russia, are required to take an exam in the Russian language to obtain a patent? Or has the required exam become optional? It is no secret that many documents are issued to migrants formally, without bothering either to check their knowledge of Russian, or to study their biography for belonging to criminal groups. So it would be nice if we finally checked all the centers that issue certificates of passing the Russian language exam. For a strange situation is developing: there are documents on the knowledge of the Russian language, but the Russian language itself is not. They could not have massively forged so many documents...

In fact, the inscriptions in Tajik and Uzbek did not appear today. This practice began to be introduced about a year ago. It was then that inscriptions in other languages appeared on screens in subway cars. We asked the Department of the Russian Language of the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University and the Department of General Linguistics of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia to comment on this "dissolution" of the Russian language into foreign languages. However, in both cases we were refused after a meeting with the dean's office. The situation, you must admit, is strange: specialists who are called upon to monitor and analyze the state of the modern Russian language, its identity, as it turned out, stand aside from this.

Meanwhile, political scientists willingly share their views on what happened.

“If there are a large number of migrants in this particular territory, I don’t see a problem in such inscriptions. Part of the reason that the authorities have been pumping people up with the Islamic threat is a surge of discontent with the incident. We were told from the TV screen that Europe had gone too far with tolerance, accepting flows of refugees. We rubbed our hands happily, talking about the problems faced by European countries flooded with refugees. And now our people are afraid and indignant. This is a consequence of the growth of xenophobia”, - political analyst Abbas Gallyamov told Novue Izvestia.

“In general, the problem of alien invasion is a common thing in human history. Usually aliens are eventually "digested" by the society, bring something new into it, but in the end the problem is solved through a kind of convergence. But the "melting pots" have certain limitations: firstly, joint work - as a condition for "fusion" and the ceiling of the numerical limitation for aliens. If their number is significantly higher than such a ceiling, if there are no conditions for joint work, the melting pot goes out, and immiscible communities appear on the same territory", - said network analyst Anatoly Nesmiyan.

Metro inscriptions in Tajik and Uzbek are not such a big problem in themselves. The point is different. The Moscow mayor's office, which is actively lobbying for the import of hundreds of thousands of new workers from Central Asia, absolutely does not take into account the opinion of the indigenous population. And dissatisfaction with this, apparently, has reached an extreme point. Duplicated inscriptions in the subway became just an excuse.

I remember that on August 28, Sergei Sobyanin said that recently there have been several serious offenses among migrants, mass fights, about 800 criminal cases have been initiated, 200 people have been deported from Moscow, and 17.5 thousand migrants have been banned from entering Russia. “We are not happy with such guests”, - the Moscow mayor summed up. Many then supported Sergei Semyonovich's unexpectedly harsh rhetoric. However, as they say, the music did not last long. Already on September 13, the deputy mayor of Moscow for economic policy and property and land relations, Vladimir Yefimov, in an interview with Izvestia, dispelled a short-term mirage: “Today, Moscow lacks about 200 thousand migrants. entry into the country will be mitigated".

It is noteworthy that the vice mayor is not saying that Moscow needs 200,000 builders or, for example, laborers or couriers. He says that it is the migrants who are needed without specifying the purpose of their use. At the same time, Moscow is not even considering the possibility of attracting labor from the Russian regions (and there are certainly plenty of willing ones) - preference is given to cheap and low-skilled labor imported from other states.

Not so long ago, the chairman of the committee on science and education, Vyacheslav Nikonov, voiced paradoxical facts in the State Duma: it turns out that Moscow ranks first among all European cities in terms of the number of Muslims, there are more than 1.5 million of them in the Russian capital, and they do not identify themselves in Russia as representatives separate nations, namely as Muslims. All European capitals are lagging behind Moscow in this regard. In London with 8.9 million inhabitants - 1.2 million Muslims, in Paris with 12 million inhabitants - about 1 million Muslims, in Berlin there are only 250 thousand Muslims.