The word Russian has two meanings in English. It can mean relating to the country of Russia, or relating to the Rus ethnicity.
The Russian language distinguishes the two. The first is росси́йский. The second is ру́сский. Both words are translated as “Russian” in English, which causes confusion in English, but there’s no such confusion in Russian.
These people (Dagestanis) are Russian in the first sense, but not the second sense.
Historically, the second sense of “Russian” included Ukrainians and Belarussians (so you could say Ukrainians were Russian in the second sense, but not the first sense) but it’s become controversial to do so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Interesting! thanks for elaborating. A week or month ago, a local Ukrainski politician, I thought it was a lady person, proclaimed that using the Russian language the invaders use is like spitting in the face of your home country. She got a hell of a lot of pushback on that. That made it seem that a lot of locals still prefer Russian to Ukrainian language. Can you shed some light on those conflicting sentiments?
Was inspired to educate myself a bit extra on Cyrillic script, so, from the english wiki:
"As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. "
…
"The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features) divided into three subgroups: East, South, and West, which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group), Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group) "
I can only approach this from the English language, which is why I said technically correct. But I also feel the article should have done a lot better job explaining that they were Dagestani, which is not unreasonable as if this had happened in Chechnya, it would have said Chechen.
Also, I have never seen Russian used interchangeably with Ukrainian, or Belarusian, before or after, 2014. But again, maybe that’s just my English language only bias.
That said, I do appreciate you writing on the explainer for other users who aren’t familiar with the status of, or distinction between Russia and the Caucasus.
The word Russian has two meanings in English. It can mean relating to the country of Russia, or relating to the Rus ethnicity.
The Russian language distinguishes the two. The first is росси́йский. The second is ру́сский. Both words are translated as “Russian” in English, which causes confusion in English, but there’s no such confusion in Russian.
These people (Dagestanis) are Russian in the first sense, but not the second sense.
Historically, the second sense of “Russian” included Ukrainians and Belarussians (so you could say Ukrainians were Russian in the second sense, but not the first sense) but it’s become controversial to do so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Interesting! thanks for elaborating. A week or month ago, a local Ukrainski politician, I thought it was a lady person, proclaimed that using the Russian language the invaders use is like spitting in the face of your home country. She got a hell of a lot of pushback on that. That made it seem that a lot of locals still prefer Russian to Ukrainian language. Can you shed some light on those conflicting sentiments?
Was inspired to educate myself a bit extra on Cyrillic script, so, from the english wiki:
"As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. " … "The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features) divided into three subgroups: East, South, and West, which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group), Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group) "
I can only approach this from the English language, which is why I said technically correct. But I also feel the article should have done a lot better job explaining that they were Dagestani, which is not unreasonable as if this had happened in Chechnya, it would have said Chechen.
Also, I have never seen Russian used interchangeably with Ukrainian, or Belarusian, before or after, 2014. But again, maybe that’s just my English language only bias.
That said, I do appreciate you writing on the explainer for other users who aren’t familiar with the status of, or distinction between Russia and the Caucasus.