DUSHANBE, July 23 (RIA Novosti) - Tajikistan's president has proposed banning the Russian language from being used in public institutions and official documents, a move he said would promote the development of Tajik and bolster patriotism in the country.
"The dignity of a nation is determined, above all, by how people preserve and respect their language," Emomali Rakhmon said in a televised address late on Wednesday.
Rakhmon urged a new language law to amend 1989 legislation that defined Tajik as the official language and Russian as a language of "interethnic communication," which gave the latter a de facto official status allowing people to use it in dealing with authorities, and receive information and documents in Tajik or Russian.
The new draft law proposed by the president and submitted to parliament obliges all nationals to know Tajik and speak it in official situations and public workplaces.
The president criticized newspaper journalists for a poor knowledge of Tajik, for using clumsy or misleading phrases and terminology, and even making spelling mistakes.
In the Soviet period, Russian was the lingua franca among the various ethnic groups in Tajikistan and other ex-Soviet republics. Many ethnic Russians have fled Tajikistan since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the ensuing civil war, but Russian is still spoken by much of the native population.
Russian is still an official language in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and it is also widely spoken in Ukraine and some other parts of the former Soviet Union.
