Central Asian Countries Signal Their Re-Orientation by Foreign Languages They Promote

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the countries of Central Asia like the other former Soviet republics chose to promote the study of languages other than Russian for their rising generations to study, The Caspian Post report citing Window On Eurasia.

Many assumed they would all move in more or less the same direction, but they haven’t, Rafiz Abazov says.

The political scientist who now teaches at Columbia University says that each of the five countries in Central Asia has gone in a different direction. Kyrgyzstan has promoted English and Chinese, Uzbekistan, Japanese; Turkmenistan, Turkish; Tajikistan, Russian; and Kazakhstan, both English and Russian.

Abazov suggests that this focus says more about the direction each of these countries is heading in the long term than do the frequent declarations of their political leaders.