Of all the languages of Russia, Russian, the most widely spoken language, is the only official language at the national level. There are 26 languages which are considered official languages in various regions of Russia, along with Russian. There are over 100 minority languages spoken in Russia today. From 2020, amendments to the Russian Constitution stipulate that Russian is the language of the "state forming people". With president Vladimir Putin's signing of an executive order on 3 July 2020 to insert the amendments into the constitution, they took effect on 4 July 2020.
History
Russian lost its status in many of the new republics that arose following the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. In Russia, however, the dominating status of the Russian language continued. Today, 97% of the public school students of Russia receive their education only or mostly in Russian, even though Russia is made up of approximately 80% ethnic Russians.
Russification
On 19 June 2018, the Russian State Duma adopted a bill that made education in all languages but Russian optional, overruling previous laws by ethnic autonomies, and reducing instruction in minority languages to only two hours a week. This bill has been likened by some commentators, such as in Foreign Affairs, to a policy of Russification.
When the bill was still being considered, advocates for the minorities warned that the bill could endanger their languages and traditional cultures. The law came after a lawsuit in the summer of 2017, where a Russian mother claimed that her son had been "materially harmed" by learning the Tatar language, while in a speech Vladimir Putin argued that it was wrong to force someone to learn a language that is not their own. The later "language crackdown" in which autonomous units were forced to stop mandatory hours of native languages was also seen as a move by Putin to "build identity in Russian society".
Protests and petitions against the bill by either civic society, groups of public intellectuals or regional governments came from Tatarstan (with attempts for demonstrations suppressed), Chuvashia, Mari El, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, the Karachays, the Kumyks, the Avars, Chechnya, and Ingushetia. Although the "hand-picked" Duma representatives from the Caucasus did not oppose the bill, it prompted a large outcry in the North Caucasus with representatives from the region being accused of cowardice. The law was also seen as possibly destabilizing, threatening ethnic relations and revitalizing the various North Caucasian nationalist movements. The International Circassian Organization called for the law to be rescinded before it came into effect. Twelve of Russia's ethnic autonomies, including five in the Caucasus called for the legislation to be blocked.
On 10 September 2019, Udmurt activist Albert Razin self-immolated in front of the regional government building in Izhevsk as it was considering passing the controversial bill to reduce the status of the Udmurt language. Between 2002 and 2010 the number of Udmurt speakers dwindled from 463,000 to 324,000. Other languages in the Volga region recorded similar declines in the number of speakers; between the 2002 and 2010 censuses the number of Mari speakers declined from 254,000 to 204,000 while Chuvash recorded only 1,042,989 speakers in 2010, a 21.6% drop from 2002. This is attributed to a gradual phasing out of indigenous language teaching both in the cities and rural areas while regional media and governments shift exclusively to Russian.
In the North Caucasus, the law came after a decade in which educational opportunities in the indigenous languages was reduced by more than 50%, due to budget reductions and federal efforts to decrease the role of languages other than Russian. During this period, numerous indigenous languages in the North Caucasus showed significant decreases in their numbers of speakers even though the numbers of the corresponding nationalities increased, leading to fears of language replacement. The numbers of Ossetian, Kumyk and Avar speakers dropped by 43,000, 63,000 and 80,000 respectively. As of 2018, it has been reported that the North Caucasus is nearly devoid of schools that teach in mainly their native languages, with the exception of one school in North Ossetia, and a few in rural regions of Dagestan; this is true even in largely monoethnic Chechnya and Ingushetia. Chechen and Ingush are still used as languages of everyday communication to a greater degree than their North Caucasian neighbours, but sociolinguistics argue that the current situation will lead to their degradation relative to Russian as well.