Greene, Robert Lane. Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can’t be Tamed. – New York: PublicAffairs, 2018. – 232 p.

“Heavy-handed language bullying is passing out of fashion in states that want to have the respect of the rest of the world.” [Greene, 2018: 140]

Greene, Robert Lane. Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can’t be Tamed. – New York: PublicAffairs, 2018. – 232 p.

“Given people’s passionate attachment to their languages, it is obvious a sudden, surprising and unwelcome change to the status of a language – especially with a big neighbor that speaks that language next door would be a particularly unwise move, like throwing a cigarette end in the general direction of a sign reading “NO SMOKING; JET FUAL’. And yet that’s exactly what happened in the former Ukraine, where disputes over language became proxies for who had the right to run Ukraine. A language dispute helped spark the civil war that dragged in neighbouring Russia, and resulted in Russia’s annexation of Crimea.”
[Greene, 2018: 141]