It’s not very often that sprats have their day in court. But after becoming embroiled in a row over language rights in Kazakhstan, the oily little fish is to play a central role in legal arguments in the oil city of Aktobe.
It’s not the sprats that’ll be in the dock, true – that place will be occupied by the owner of a store that proved unable to provide a customer with details about sprats in the Kazakh language, the Novosti-Kazakhstan news agency reports.
The disgruntled customer went racing to his lawyer after the shop couldn’t produce information in Kazakh about the tin of fish he’d purchased for 80 cents.
This consumer rights pioneer is now suing the shop in the Aktobe City Court for breaking laws which guarantee that all information should be available in Kazakh – in this case details about the manufacturer, the manufacturing date, and “recommendations for use” of the sprats.
It’s pretty unlikely that the customer really didn’t know what the sprats were for, but he probably wants to score a legal point about enforcing the use of Kazakh in the public sphere, where Russian often dominates. Legally, Kazakh has the status of the state language, while Russian is “used officially on an equal level with the Kazakh language in state organizations and bodies of local self-government” – a confusing division that fudges the controversy over language in Kazakhstan.
The use of Kazakh in public life has grown in recent years, but many ethnic Kazakhs still feel it is drowned out by the domination of Russian in the media, in public discourse and on the streets of many towns.
The latest salvo in the government’s battle to promote Kazakh in the face of resistance from some Russians and members of Kazakhstan’s other ethnic minorities is a plan to get 95 percent of people speaking Kazakh by 2020, against an estimated 60 percent now.
As part of efforts to meet this ambitious target – set out in a program for the development of languages for 2011-2020 unveiled in draft form at the end of July – the government wants to make the language cool. “Day to day communication in Kazakh should become prestigious and fashionable, especially in the youth environment,” Culture Minister Mukhtar Kul-Mukhammed said at the time.
If Kazakh really becomes the language of choice in all spheres, the legal spat over sprats in Aktobe may just be a harbinger of things to come.
Joanna Lillis is a journalist based in Almaty and author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan.
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