Untitled

saxelmwifo enis swavlebis sakiTxebi:
problemebi da gamowvevebi
Issues of State Language Teaching;
Problems and Challenges
be Vodic; presently, their overwhelming majority speak Russian… The nation has not been included in the
post-war censuses. The language disappeared and the nation did too. The same happened with Livs (Latvia),
Oroks (Sakhalin), Iaghnobis, Talysh (Azerbaijan) and many others" (Kikvidze, 1990: 187).
M. Rilski says that "Kazakh poet Mukhtar Ayezov accurately named Russian 'the second native language'
of all educated non-Russians of the Soviet Union" (Rilski, 1962: 102). However, there is different information:
"When N. S. Khrushchov was ascending the stairs in Minsk State University, he turned back to the followers
and declared: "The sooner we begin to speak Russian, the sooner we will build communism." Following
that, T. Usumbaliev, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan, declared Russian the second
native language for the Kyrgyz people" (Kikvidze, 1990: 187). It is noteworthy that, in that period, it was
a step forward fore the Kyrgyz as far as their language was given the statyus of 'the first' at least formally.
While writing about the so called 'second native language,' Russophone authors do their best to present
the concept, designated by the 'term,' as granted, that is to somehow indoctrinate it (see, for instance, Beloded,
1969; Kostomarov, 1963, Desheriev at al., 1965; Baziyev & Isayev, 1975; Khanazarov, 1973; Garşva, 1989).
In order to illustrate the above said, we will discuss statements by some of the authors. "The second native
language can be in the direct sense applied to a language which is spoken by individuals since their first years
together with their mother tongue, which is observed in mixed families in which two (or more) languages are
simultaneously spoken. Besides, the second native language can refer to a language of the population who lost
or loses their 'first native language'" (Garşva, 1989: 31). The following comments are to be made here: (1) the
author puts „первый родной язык“ (first native language) in the quotation marks while второй родной язык
(second native language) is without them; (2) from a scholarly standpoint, K. Garşva's opinion is queer (otherwise,
her statement, as either a political or propagandistic discourse, is quite definable): she takes второй
родной язык, as a term, for granted; following that, she tries to findf some definition to it or provide with an
empirical foundation.
When V. Avrorin speaks about the difficulties, associated with the definition of the term bilingualism, he
states that those, who do not consider it necessary to somehow strictly define the phenomenon in point, regard
people's huge masses without discriminating them, more or less speaking two languages, refer to them as bilinguals,
and, only after that, select such a definition for bilingualism as not let no single entity of that mass
separated from it, thus maintaining its mass character, comprising millions. "This is what I mean when I speak
about a reverse order of judgment: not from an essence toward a nomination, but from a nomination toward an
essence. This is how it is done in the case of 'second native language'" (Avrorin, 1975: 142). It must be
pointed out that Avrorin is one of the few exceptions among the Russophone scholars who try to analyse the
problem in a scholarly way.
We should deal with the approach of another author: "Second native language means that the language of
intra-ethnic relations, the language of the leading and the most developed nation, became a source of the spiritual
development of all degraded and suppressed nationalities, and, in this sense, it became intimate and native
for them. A language of intra-ethnic relations becomes a second native language for a given nation not because
the whole nation has acquired it equally well as their native tongue but because the language of intraethnic
relations, together with the national one, is necessary for its development in the multi-national socialist
state" (Khanazarov 1963: 200). We will reply to this agitation passage with V. Avrorin's comment as far as it
emphasizes not only the groundlessness of the approach, set forward in the above-presented quote, but also
provides a noteworthy niche in terms of the vulture-specific nature of conceptual metaphors: "Again, there is a
discrepancy. In the beginning it provides an axiom that Russian became the second native language for all
non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union, while it is known that very few non-Russians speak it like a native
tongue. This is the intellingentsia and not all of them; such ones more rarely occur among workers and peasants.
We might have found a way out if we went to the paved way by means of ultimately widening the notion
"second native language." This is how disclaimers of any kind of strictness in scholarship behave. They suffice
the fact that the second one is the language of intra-ethnic relations, playing the significant role in and
being greatly respected among the peoples of the Soviet Union, and refer to it as a native (second native) language.
Hence, the metaphor occupies a place of a scientific term, being quite reasonable in the language of
poetry and journalism, in any text, written in the elevated celebrative style, however, it is not compatible with
the accurateness of the prosaic language of scholarship" (Avrorin, 1975: 143). It is noteworthy that what is
acceptable at least as a metaphor, if not a term, "in the language of poetry and journalism, in any text, written
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