Communists ask for clarity – Newspaper Kommersant No. 235 (7436) of 12/19/2022

Deputy of the Moscow City Duma Elena Yanchuk (KPRF) this week will submit a bill that proposes to simplify the language of the capital’s regulations. Modern laws, in her opinion, are overloaded with complex turns, highly specialized terms and bureaucratic jargon. This does not allow people whose lives are regulated by these norms to fully understand them and influence the change in their content, Ms. Yanchuk believes. United Russia says that developments in this direction are already underway – in particular, in the field of replacing foreign analogues of Russian words.

The bill proposes to supplement Art. 11 of the Law “On Legal Acts of the City of Moscow” with the norm on simplifying their language: the presentation should be “simple and understandable”, which means that when writing them, “clericalism, professional jargon, borrowed words and complex syntactic constructions” should be avoided. In the explanatory note, Elena Yanchuk refers to a 2018 scientific monograph by the State Language Research Institute of St. Petersburg University, which notes that “no more than five percent of the country’s inhabitants understand the language of legislative acts.” According to the deputy, the complexity of the presentation of laws “leads to a misunderstanding between the authorities and society”, and correcting the situation will contribute to the “development of civil society” and “implementation of fundamental constitutional principles.” In particular, Ms. Yanchuk notes that according to the law on legal acts, residents of the capital “are subjects of lawmaking”, but it is “difficult without a deep understanding” of the laws, which makes it necessary to state them “in a simple and understandable language.” Kommunist also recalls the experience of other countries: in particular, New Zealand, which adopted a similar law last fall, and the United States, which enshrined similar norms back in 2010.

To prove the need to change the language of laws, Elena Yanchuk researched several normative acts of Moscow with the help of linguists. They pointed to the accumulation of participles and the frequent use of highly specialized and foreign language terms (for example, “spending sequestration” and “securities listing”).

Ms. Yanchuk emphasizes that her initiative does not involve the introduction of any restrictions for ordinary people and only concerns the unjustified use of foreign words. “The bill does not set the task of inventing or selecting Russian synonyms for all words borrowed from other languages, which are many in our language,” the explanatory note says. “This is required mainly when the borrowed term is less known than the Russian counterpart.”

It should be noted that on December 13, the State Duma adopted in the first reading a bill clarifying the procedure for using foreign words at the state level. The document proposes to oblige officials to comply with the “norms of the Russian literary language”, comparing them and acceptable foreign words with reference books to be developed by the government.

Proposals to clean up the language of laws from unnecessary red tape are periodically made, since this is dictated by the need for an unambiguous understanding of the meaning of the document, Alexander Semennikov (United Russia), head of the Moscow City Duma commission on legislation, told Kommersant. There are developments in this direction, the deputy noted, citing the aforementioned law “On the state language” as an example. “In addition, there is a judicial and law enforcement practice of interpreting terms and word blocks,” added Mr. Semennikov. “It is clear that it is impossible to change this in one day, because there is a huge array of already adopted laws set out in a certain style and lexical uniformity. It is unrealistic to move from the language, conditionally, of “War and Peace” to the syllable of the fairy tale about Alyonushka and brother Ivanushka at once. However, the bill has not yet been submitted to the City Duma, and it will be interesting to look at what and how it is written there, “the deputy added.

Kira Heifetz