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Polish - Belarusian - Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5839 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes  Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 9 of 9 27 May 2013 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||
Ok, you are more of an expert than I am, obviously! So if that's your view it's more likely to be right than mine.. But to me it did not look very similar. However I can easily recognise plenty of words from spoken Polish that are similar to Russian. It looks quite different written down though, I think. And the two different alphabets don't help... In a way, I guess they got their first national identity as "Belarus" during the USSR days, as a Soviet republic. So their independence was a continuation of that trend. I spent a fair bit of time there and the history is quite volatile. All the surrounding countries has been pulling them in various directions. I don't know what the Soviet years did to the language situation there - it may have varied a bit. The USSR seems to have shifted back and forth between promoting local languages and then at times pushing quite hard for Russian. In the 1990s there was a period of Belarussian language revival but it never really took hold and in reality I think it's more practical for most people to use Russian. I was told that schools focussed quite a bit on Belarussian in the 90s, but has since backed off and is now simply keeping it as a mandatory language on the school curriculum. There is a sort of national poet in Belarus who has many streets named after him, statues etc; Yanka Kupala is his nickname. Unless I am mistaken he lived around the time of national romanticism in Europe and I think he is a bit to Belarussian what Pushkin is to Russian. When it comes to Polish, I think the USSR might not necessarily have warmly supported the speaking of Polish. They were probably keen to incorporate the area as part of the Belarus republic in the USSR rather than celebrate the old ties with Poland. Possibly they were suspicious about the Polish speakers since they were very religious and did not have a socialist background. I never heard anyone complain about the situation back then, or today when I visited, but I remember reading an article about how the Polish speakers today are allegedly oppressed. That does not tie up with what I saw. This is really talking about a small minority of the population in a corner of the country; almost exclusively elderly people and I certainly don't think anyone cares what language they speak between themselves, least of all the gov't there. The Catholic churches preached in Polish and Russian, and most tourist promotional material seemed to be in Polish with quite a few visitors from there, so I hardly think it's a big problem. You can find enclaves like that in many European countries and it's just the result the two wars in the 20th century. Obviously you can always find somebody who is unhappy if that's what you want to find. Either way, the Polish speakers were just a small minority. Edited by cordelia0507 on 27 May 2013 at 12:59am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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