"European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages " and the Questions of Georgia's Language Policy

Abstract

The Government of Georgia, in accordance with the obligations taken before the European Council, signed "the Convention about the National Minorities"' in 27th January 1999. The Parliament of Georgia ratified this international document in 2005². In the same year, 1999, the Georgian Government accepted the responsibility to sign and confirm “European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages”(ECRML) and ratify it in 2000. However, it has not been done to these days.

The ratification of ECRML has been procrastinated in Georgia for its contradictory, not infrequently, and biased interpretations. Namely, on the basis of varied understanding of the Charter criteria the Georgian Government is offered to recognize, in the ECRML format, from ten to twenty regional or minority languages³. It should also be noted here that even in the leading European countries we encounter different interpretations of the Charter. And a part of European countries refuse to join it⁴.

Those countries that have already joined the ECRML can be presented in two different groups according to their approach to the compilation of their lists of the regional or minority languages. These are western European countries, on the one hand, and post-Soviet countries, on the other; in particular:

Ratification documents of the Western European countries have very few numbers of languages in their lists: the emphasis is made on the autochthonic ethnic and language minorities whose language is not a state (national) language and is under the threat of elimination (see, for instance, the variants of UK, Finland and Spain).

In the post-Soviet space ratification documents, not infrequently, are attached long list of languages, where, quite illogically, there figures the Russian language (see, for example, Romanian, Polish and Armenian variants)⁵.

The aforesaid difference may arouse, not perhaps entirely groundless, suspicion of a Russian influence on the establishment of the attitudes of the post-Soviet countries in the interpretation of the ECRML.⁶

It is also worth mentioning that Russia makes active efforts to widespread inadequate linguistic and ethnic characterization of the Georgian population; the position of Russia is expressed in the type of language and ethnic analyses of Georgia as are presented by e.g. Yuri Koryakov, Artur Tsustyev, Rustam Vakhitov and others who view a part of Georgians like Megrels, Acharians, Laz and Svans as non-Georgian ethnic groups⁷.

In the process of discussing the Charter recent publications confine to the two main debatable issues: First, declaring a part of the ethnic Georgians as language/ethnic minorities, and second, to determine the autochthony of the ethnic minorities. Namely, some foreign or Georgian experts deal with certain Georgian dialects as minority languages; and, in parallel, the same authors refer to different ethnic groups, - settled in the country for the purpose of changing demographic situation during Russian or other empire periods, - as Georgia’s historical population and, correspondingly, their mother tongues are classed as “endangered languages of historical ethnic groups.”

Let us examine how well these approaches are grounded?

In my opinion, in the first place, while discussing the problems of ethnic minorities, the following two questions should be separated:

Protecting endangered languages (the right of existence of the languages of the autochthonic minorities) and linguistic rights of minority representatives.

I would like to emphasize that ECRML is drawn up to solve the problems of the languages of the first type, that is, of the problems of languages of autochthonic ethnic minorities.