Authors

Vlada Baranova¹;  ¹ NRU- Higher School of Economics - St. Petersburg , Russian Federation

Discussion

The paper aims at revealing ‘bottom-up’ approach to language management. Hornberger and her colleagues (2018: 152) point out “how people create, interpret, and at times resist language policy and planning”. The official language policy looks contradictory in the Russian Federation. The legislation is oriented toward the development of minority languages, nevertheless, it is often more restrictive than supportive. At the same time this ideology is challenged nowadays by growing activism of different minority groups. There are different initiatives in popular music, video, or blogging and some art projects including the design of souvenirs and fashion, etc. Such impressive initiatives thus arise between activism and social entrepreneurship due to the growing popularity of local cultures. In some regions, minority language speakers request to follow the rules to challenge monolingual communication. Citizens of ethnic republics are actively involved in inspecting how the law on minority language usage is executed, for example in linguistic landscape. The paper is based on narrative interviews with activists from Kalmykia, Chuvashia, Udmurtia and Mari El held in 2018–2020 and on observations of offline and online communication. Analyzing and comparing data on different grass-roots linguistic projects, the paper shows how efforts of different actors can contribute to possible transformations in domineering language ideology.