November 2017: a Tatar language schoolbook. (c) Maxim Bogodvid / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.On 29 November 2017, the state council of the Republic of Tatarstan, a wealthy autonomous region in Russia’s Volga region, passed a version of the school curriculum proposed by Moscow. According to this document, the Tatar language may now only be studied in the region’s schools only with the consent of pupils’ parents — and for no longer than two hours a week.
The Tatar language was once obligatory in all Tatarstan schools — so why, 25 years on, has one of the last attributes of the region’s autonomy and sovereignty finally met its end?
A very unique agreement
Tatar, of the Turkic language family, counts as Russia’s second language — both by geographic distribution and number of native speakers. As of 2010, nearly 4.3m people declared themselves to be Tatar speakers (the USSR’s census of 1989 put their number at 5.1m).
