The Round Table “Russian State Language Policy and the Present Status of the Russian Language in the World” was held in the framework of the V St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum on December 2, 2016. The event was organised by the Russian Committee for the UNESCO Information for All Programme, Interregional Library Cooperation Center, St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Book Union and the Mayakovski St. Petersburg City Library under financial support of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.
The UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education was represented at the Round Table by Tatiana Murovana, the UNESCO IITE Programme Specialist. Ms. Murovana talked on a role of Open Educational Resources and open content in promoting and strengthening not only the minority languages but also the major world languages.
Dr. Evgeny Kuzmin, Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Council and Chair of the Russian Committee for the UNESCO Information for All Programme, Head of the UNESCO Working Group on Multilingualism in Cyberspace and President of the Interregional Library Cooperation Centre, moderated the round table discussion. Ms. Maria Pushkina, President of the Pushkin International Foundation (Belgium), welcomed the participants. The key speeches were delivered by:
- Dr. Nicolay Kazansky (Director, Linguistic Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Member, Presidential Council for Russian Language);
- Dr. Alexander Arefiev (Deputy Director, Sociology Research Centre, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation);
- Dr. Svetlana Drugoveiko-Dolzhanskaya (Head of Research of the internet portal Culture of Written Speech; Member, Presidential Council for Russian Language);
- Dr. Michail Osadchy (Vice-Rector, Pushkin State Russian Language Institute);
- Ms. Marina Abramova (Deputy Director-General, EKSMO-AST Publishing House);
- Mr. Ainar Komarovsky (Chair of the Board, Dinamunde NGO, Lithuania);
- Ms. Uo Do (Russian Language Teacher, Sichuan International Studies University, China).
The Round Table was attended by leading Russian and foreign experts in philology and linguistic diversity, nongovernmental organisations’ activists, researchers, educators and journalists.
