Language policy and language issues in the successor states of the former USSR

This text looks at the question of language rights: the rights of minorities to remain monolingual if they so wish and the rights of governments to promote the language of the majority as the official language of the state.

The central question is once again the thorny problem of whether linguistic rights are fundamental human rights, and therefor inalienable and individual, or whether they are group rights, since communication necessarily involves more than one individual.

The context of this disussion is the Russian speakers in Latvia and Kyrgzstan.