On the Threat to Russian’s Status as a World Language

Timothy Sergay,

Associate professor and translator of Russian at the University at Albany, State University of New York

E-mail: tsergay@albany.edu

This article is remarks delivered by video-recording to the International Internet Conference and Humanities Forum “The Russian Language Between Europe and Asia,” held 30 May — 1 June 2013 in Perm, Russia. These remarks were invited by, and addressed to, the panel “Russian in the Dialogue of Cultures” on Friday, 31 May 2013. Speaking about the threats to Russian as a world language, the author prefers tactics of support of nonacademic training programs for Russian children and grandchildren of immigrants from Russian-speaking areas to tactics of “ramping up foreign Russian-language studies”.

Keywords: the Russian Language, threat, “zealots”, discourse, falsification of dissertations.