Language Policy and Identity in Post-Soviet Tatarstan

This paper examines language policy and language use as a feature of identity in the Republic of Tatarstan approximately twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Tatarstan is an autonomous republic politically situated within the Russian Federation, it has its own language policy which was implemented in 1992 and which declares Russian and Tatar as the official state languages having equal status in all spheres of language use. This research examines how these policies have legitimized the Tatar identity alongside Russian from the top-down perspective, but how these legitimacies are not reflected from the bottom-up perspective. Empirical research was carried out in Kazan in 2010 and revealed that asymmetrical bilingualism still prevails in contemporary Tatar society and this seems to be related to the differences in identity which Brubaker posited in his civic versus ethnic model.