The State Duma introduced new amendments to the law “On the State Language of the Russian Federation”
[ad_1]
Russian, as the state language, is subject to mandatory use in “commercial designations”, and in “information for public information to consumers” the use of foreign words should be limited, unless we are talking about trademarks. This is stated in the bill submitted by a group of United Russia deputies to the State Duma. The authors of the document believe that with its adoption, shop windows and signs will get rid of “such inscriptions as coffee, fresh, sale, shop, open” – they will be replaced by Russian-language analogues. Current legislation allows the use of foreign words if they are provided with footnotes in Russian of the same size, and the amendments do not change this order, the expert points out.
Project amendments to the law “On the state language of the Russian Federation” and other normative acts were submitted to the State Duma by nine deputies. Among them are the heads of the committees on culture, on economic policy, on construction and housing and communal services, as well as on information policy: Elena Yampolskaya, Maxim Topilin, Sergei Pakhomov and Alexander Khinshtein (all from United Russia). By the Law “On the State Language of the Russian Federation,” deputies proposed to oblige the use of the Russian language “for commercial use” (with the exception of trademarks).
The Law “On Protection of Consumer Rights”, in their opinion, should be supplemented with Art. 10.1 about “information intended for public information to consumers.” It is stipulated that we are not talking about advertising, but about signboards, information signs, signs and “other media”. The information on them must be presented in Russian, but – “at the discretion of the manufacturer” – supplemented with foreign words. Deputies also propose to consider the names of residential complexes, including low-rise ones, as “commercial designations”, obliging developers to also indicate them in Russian.
According to the law “On the State Language of the Russian Federation,” Russian is declared the state language, and Art. 3 obliges its use in a number of areas, including in government bodies, in elections, in courts, when preparing documents and writing the names of geographical objects, in the media, advertising, when showing films and in other areas (for example, in notaries and radio communications in airplanes on the territory of the Russian Federation).
“Advertising billboards, store signs, names of residential complexes… are everywhere full of attention-grabbing foreign words,” complain the document’s authors in the explanatory note, believing that the amendments will protect the language from “Anglicisms.”
“It should become impossible to use such inscriptions as coffee, fresh, sale, shop, open on signs and shop windows,” the document explains.
“The practice of assigning names to residential complexes and villages in foreign languages or using derivatives” should also be stopped. It should be noted that the draft also mentions broader norms. Thus, in the “Fundamentals of the Legislation of the Russian Federation on Culture” it is proposed to add a clause stating that “the unifying role in the historical consciousness of the multinational people of the Russian Federation belongs to the Russian language and Russian culture.”
Let us remind you that in February 2023 the State Duma accepted a law introduced by the government of the Russian Federation obliging compliance with the “norms of the Russian literary language”, checking them and acceptable foreign words with reference books to be developed by the Cabinet of Ministers. At the same time, the co-author of the current amendments, Elena Yampolskaya, during the discussion of the document in the State Duma, discussed the admissibility of the expressions “Petrushka wore an oversized second-hand trench coat and had a typical face” (having probably read an excerpt from “a school classic retold by a TikToker”, published in Rossiyskaya newspaper” in 2020). At the same time, the deputy even then believed that with the adoption of government amendments “we will get rid of all these opens, sales, food courts, cashbacks, from this lackey surzhik” (see “Kommersant” dated December 13, 2022).
At the same time, some Telegram channels and news agencies reported that the document would generally prohibit “the use of foreign words, with the exception of those that do not have commonly used analogues in the Russian language.” But in reality this norm was contained in Art. 6 of the law since at least 2013.
Today, placing foreign words on outdoor advertising is possible in several cases, reminds Andrei Baiduzhiy, director of the all-Russian outdoor advertising booking service All-billboards: “If a foreign word is registered as a trademark, trade name, service mark, or if there is a footnote in Russian below, the translation , for example, sale and the signature “sale” at the bottom.” The expert recalls that this procedure is described in Art. 3 of the Law “On the State Language of the Russian Federation”. Indeed, paragraph 2 of the article talks about the admissibility of using foreign words in signs and other information for consumers if there are duplicate inscriptions in Russian – the same content, design and size. The bill does not change this procedure.
[ad_2]
Source link
