The number of hours allocated for studying Chechen in Chechen schools will remain unchanged, Ilyas Taeev, the First Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Chechnya, has told local news agencies. He did not comment on the statement made by his superior, Chechnya’s Minister of Education and Science Khozh-Baudi Daaev, who at the end of August said that the hours would be cut fivefold.
On Monday, Taaev stated that there would be no overall reduction in the teaching of the Chechen language, the state-run media outlet Chechnya Today reported.
‘There will be no reduction in the overall volume of the Chechen language. Given that a unified timetable and unified curricula are now being strictly introduced, we have moved one hour of Chechen from classroom activities to extracurricular activities. One hour has been transferred in terms of volume. The overall volume of Chechen language teaching is not being reduced, it remains at the same level’, Taaev said.
Immediately after this, the previous Grozny-inform article quoting Daaev and stating that hours were being cut was altered without any note of correction.
In the updated version of Daaev’s statement, he reportedly said that in previous years, on the orders of Chechen Head Ramzan Kadyrov, five hours per week were allocated for Chechen language and literature in grades two through eight, adding that now one of these hours will be moved to extracurricular activities. The article stressed that the overall volume of teaching will remain the same.
At the same time, the original version of the article about a fivefold reduction in Chechen language study has been preserved on various aggregators and in cached versions.
This summer, Russia’s Education Ministry stated that in the first grade, the single hour allocated to the study of native languages across the country is being moved to non-mandatory extracurricular activities due to changes in the maximum amount of hours children are allowed to be kept at school.
In July 2018, the Russian Parliament adopted amendments to the law on education, which provided for the study of state languages within the Russian republics on a voluntary basis.
The Chechen language is spoken mainly in Chechnya, as well as in the Khasavyurt and Novolak districts of Daghestan, in Ingushetia, and in a number of countries abroad, including Georgia, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. According to the Russian independent media outlet Caucasian Knot, in 1994, before the start of the First Chechen War, the number of speakers was between 750,000 and 950,000 out of a total population of some 1.3 million.
According to data published by the Russian Education Ministry in 2021, Chechen is one of the most spoken among Russia’s indigenous peoples, with over two million speakers.
Elizaveta Chukharova
