[LINK] "Belarusians Increase Share of Republic’s Population but Speak National Language Less, Census

[rfmcdonald]

Window on Eurasia reports on the results from last year's census in Belarus. The broad trends--population aging, an excess of women over men, the assimilation of ethnic minorities at the same time that the Russian language makes headway--aren't much of a surprise, but it's nice to get confirmation.

Minsk has now released the results of the national census Belarus conducted in 2009. The most dramatic figure is that Belarus has suffered a serious decline in its total population, with that statistic falling from 10,045,000 in 1999 to 9,500,000, the kind of decline that has afflicted neighboring Slavic republics as well (unuan.net/?p=20).

But as Belarusian demographers note, this overall decline is hardly the only “negative demographic tendency” the new census has shown. Over the last 10 years, the percentage of adult men and women who are married has declined, the result both of an increasing gender imbalance – 1150 women for every 1,000 men – and a growing number of divorces.

The first of these, largely the result of greater alcoholism among men, is preventing Belarus even more than the Russian Federation or Ukraine from overcoming the gender imbalance that was produced by the greater number of male deaths in World War II, while the second is part of a broader pattern.

In addition, Belarus has seen the share of pensioners increase and the number of children decrease by almost 30 percent, a figure that does not augur well for the future. And the census showed that 75 percent of Belarusians now live in cities, a figure certain to increase because the rural population is declining much more rapidly than the urban one.

The ethnic mix of the population has changed as well over the inter-censal period. Now, Belarusians form 84 percent of the population, up from 81 percent in1999, while the share of ethnic Russians has declined from 11 percent to 8 percent, and that of ethnic Ukrainians from 2.4 percent to 2 percent.

[. . . ]

The Belarusian census also found that the share of the republic’s population who consider Belarusian to be their native language has declined from “almost 74 percent” in 1999 to only 53 percent now, a bare majority. And only 23 percent say they use that language at home on a regular basis, down from 37 percent a decade ago.

As I understand it, the Russian language has displaced Belarusian in public life at least as thoroughly as (say) English in Ireland; or, perhaps more accurately, it has prevented Belarusian from occupying that place. It's not surprising to see the usage of Belarusian to continue to decline.