Tatars - II

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

[RUSSIA]

CONSTITUTIONAL COURT REJECTS LATIN SCRIPT FOR TATAR LANGUAGE. The Constitutional Court rejected on 16 November a suit by Tatarstan's parliament seeking to replace the use of the Cyrillic alphabet with the Latin alphabet for the Tatar language, RFE/RL's Kazan bureau reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 6 October 2004). The court ruled that only federal-level legislators have the right to decide such linguistic matters, and that by introducing its own linguistic reform without special permission from federal legislative bodies, Tatarstan risked threatening the linguistic integrity of the Russian Federation. Following the decision, Tatar President Mintimir Shaimiev said that he does not consider the question closed. "I would say that yesterday's decision by the Constitutional Court does not deprive Russian Federation subjects of the right to consider this issue -- it can be resolved through the adoption of a federal law," RIA-Novosti quoted him as saying on 17 November. Tatar parliamentary speaker Farid Mukhametshin told reporters that the republic is not planning on removing street signs in Latin script because "there is a similar situation in Moscow, where I saw several buildings and restaurants [bearing signs] with Latin script." JAC