School Education in Minority Languages in Russia: Regional Characteristics and Dynamics of the Situation

This master's thesis is devoted to the issue of minority language education in Russian regions. This topic remains in the focus of research in recent years due to the ambiguous situation with the legal regulation of language education (at the level of Russian republics), as well as facts of violations of the population's rights to choose the language of school instruction. However, in the other 41 of 85 Russian regions (which don’t have regulations of language policy as republics have) there are schools where instruction is conducted in the languages of the peoples of Russia, and these regions are often left unheeded. Existing quantitative research either describes the situation in Russia as a whole, or individual cases of regions/municipalities/schools. The unevenness of the topic elaboration can complicate the process of political decisions, which are impossible without evidence base. In this paper, we proceed from the premise that every citizen of the Russian Federation has the right to study and preserve his native languages. In different regions of the country, it is implemented in different ways and in different volumes, depending on the characteristics of the territories. The analysis is aimed to describe the scope and specifics of the organization of language training in the regions, but not to the value judgments about current situations. The paper describes the main advantages of minority-language school education for society and the state. Based on the available data, specific regional characteristics of the distribution of minority-language students were identified. The results were used to create interactive dashboards, that allow to analyze the distribution of languages in the school system of the regions.