Russia’s teachers propose creation of “linguistic police”

The Association of Russian Language and Literature Teachers has offered a suggestion on how to protect the Russian language from foreign influences and loan words – introduce a linguistic police force.

“This ‘linguistic police’ can, for example, be a division of the police department … with time the project could make a difference,” said Roman Doschinsky, a member of the presidential language council.

“Take a look now at the name of our cafe, shops … [Our children] see distorted images of words, words where the Latin alphabet is mixed with the Cyrillic alphabet. And [they] absorb this.”

The authors of the initiative have cited France’s so-called Toubon Law, which mandates the use of the French language in official government publications, in advertising and descriptions of goods and services, at the workplace, and at state-owned schools, along with some other contexts. The French can be fined for choosing to use language other than French in situations where French would have sufficed. For instance, in 2006, the French subsidiary of an American company was fined for providing highly technical documents and software interfaces to its employees in English only. The use of foreign words in music is also strictly regulated in France.