Languages in Public Space
Maryna Šukiurava is herself one of the voices that define the everyday soundscape in Belarus to a significant extent. Some people – especially the Belarusian speaking and pro-democratic ones – know her as a singer popularizing the Belarusian folk songs tradition and ethnic culture among the younger and Russian-speaking audiences. As a voice coach, she trains people, including some public figures, to become better speakers. But thousands of people are not aware that they hear her voice every day while commuting. Even though Šukiurava had to leave the country in 2020, in 2023 her voice was still used for automatic announcements of train arrivals and departures at the Minsk and Brest railway stations, as well as in some ATM machines.
Public transport in Minsk and other bigger cities is one of the few public spaces where Belarusian language can be heard daily. In Minsk all the stops and most of other public messages in buses, trolleybuses, trams, and metro trains are announced in Belarusian. In 2014 the Minsk Metro has dubbed its announcements in English. Introduced before the World Hockey Championship held that year — and canceled soon afterwards — these announcements changed the perception of the city for many people and some have missed the “Mind the doors, please!” since. In 2017 English language in the metro was reintroduced along with the introduction of a five-day (and later thirty-day) visa-free travel period for foreigners. Before the 2nd European Games held in 2019, one could also hear longer English announcements in buses “guiding” tourists through the city, telling about notable buildings, figures, and events. This was in parallel to the improvement of street signage that utilized a system of local geographical names transliteration almost identical to łacinka, the historical Belarusian Latin script (Salakheyeva 2020). Anthropologist, urban mobility and soundscape researcher Andrey Vazyanau comments on the use of English in Belarusian public transport:
In the media and in urban gossip, announcements in the metro in Belarusian and English resonated with discussions on the tourist-friendliness of the capital city; for locals, meanwhile, they provoke a sense of alienation and a questioning of the familiar city, as if being in it for the first time. Moreover, the bilingualism of transport seemed to inaugurate an atmosphere of Europeanization – a new atmosphere that was particularly significant given the long debated issue of the ambiguous course navigated by the Belarusian state. (Vozyanov 2018: 82)
Belarusian, English, and Russian announcements in Minsk metro train (Line 3, 26.02.2021). While the stations are announced in Belarusian and English, some other messages – like a reminder to wear masks – are only made in Russian.
After the protests of 2020 and the growing hostility of the regime to the “collective West” it was announced that English language would disappear from metro trains and stations in March 2021. Later the city authorities changed their mind – presumably due to the city residents’ reaction, which, if true, would be a rare case of people influencing political decisions (TUT.BY 2021). Debates on which languages should be used in the metro got a new turn since 2022. Pro-Russian activists demanded from the state to curtail the Belarusian language use in public spaces (Naša Niva 2023f), and the state often yields to these demands. As a result of this pressure, by the end of 2023 the Belarusian Latin script signs, installed just a few years earlier, were taken away from the streets, roads, bus stops, and metro stations. Belarusian language announcements in trains and railway stations also started disappearing quietly – “for technical reasons” (Naša Niva 2023a, 2023b).
As of 2022, there were no English “audio guides” in public transport. Instead, Belarusian language comments were played when buses approached stops named after the Great Patriotic War and other Soviet Era military heroes and heroines, Kazłoŭ, Kižavataŭ et al. This practice confirms the key role of the USSR and BSSR military history in the current Belarusian state ideology and the militarization of public space, especially in 2022, a year inaugurated as “The Year of Historical Memory.”
As part of “Year of Historical Memory” activities, in 2022 audio recordings in buses and trolleybuses told about military heroes to whom bus stops were dedicated.
In the 2010s Belarus – and Minsk in particular – were anticipating and preparing for a tourist boom by developing the infrastructure – hotels, malls, and street signage – but it didn’t quite happen. Instead, a Belarus-EU border crisis broke out in 2021. Hopefully, English language announcements in metro helped thousands of people from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and African countries to navigate the city during this wave of irregular migration decoyed as tourism.
In May 2021 the Ryanair flight 4978 Athens-Vilnius was forced by the Belarusian security and Air Force to land in Minsk to arrest an opposition activist, Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, who both were on board. As a result, the air travel between Belarus and the world was almost severed. Despite this, Minsk became a hub for migrants from Asian and African countries who usually spent a few days in the city as regular tourists before heading to the border of Lithuania, Latvia or Poland in an attempt to cross it. Many new hotels that were built for the sporting “mega-events” and were empty during the first year of the pandemic, now hosted the migrants. Journalistic investigations showed that tourist agencies controlled by the state, as well as the Belarusian and Russian security services were involved in this trafficking. By November 2021 the crisis has reached its peak with clashes at the Belarusian-Polish border instigated and controlled by the Belarusian border service that used migrants as a “hybrid weapon” to provoke the Polish border guards. The clashes were streamed by the state TV (Pérez-Peña 2021).
The central Minsk avenues and malls were filled with thousands of people (mostly young men and fewer families) who spoke Kurdish, Arabic, and other languages not common in the local soundscape. The city residents were surprised – and some irritated – that migrants were allowed to gather in hundreds, pray in underpasses, and even perform a traditional Kurdish dance in front of the largest shopping mall on the main avenue. By that time no street actions by opposition activists was tolerated, and some Belarusians, including journalists, mentioned the double standards of the regime that allowed mass gatherings of foreigners while persecuting Belarusians for even a minor political activity. Thus the city space, once claimed by the protesters’ voices, once again became alienated, as the state first silenced the opposition and then expressly let other groups to voice their frustration with the West.
