"I'd say that yesterday's decision by the Constitutional Court does not strip Federation member states, in this case the Republic of Tatartstan, of the right to examine this problem further. The issue can be solved through the adoption of a federal law," Shaimiyev said.

The Constitutional Court has concluded that the use of the Cyrillic alphabet by the Tartar language does not contradict the Supreme Law of the Russian Federation. Neither has it found any contradiction in the Russian and the Tartar languages being equally prominent on the school curriculum in Tatarstan.

According to Shaimiyev, opinions in Tatarstan are divided over the appropriateness of transferring the Tartar language to the Latin alphabet at this point in time. Opponents argue that the switchover may adversely affect Tartars living outside the republic. If Tatarstan decides to adopt the Latin alphabet, the 500,000-strong Tartar population of the neighboring Bashkortostan, for example, will find itself linguistically isolated from the fellow Tartars back home.

"As a matter of fact, the decision [to switch over to the Latin alphabet] was adopted at the 1st Congress of Tartars precisely under the influence of [Tartars] in the Diaspora," Shaimiyev said. However, according to him, "most of the Tartars still use the Cyrillic alphabet."

"We'll carry on with the experiment,'' the President of Tatarstan said. "We shall take our time to fully comprehend the problem as the fate of the 7 mln-strong nation is at stake."

Shaimiyev also pointed out that the alphabet issue had eclipsed the Constitutional Court's conclusion concerning the legitimacy of teaching both Russian and Tartar at schools of Tatarstan. "The Constitutional Court fully supported our actions, recognizing them as legitimate," he noted, adding that if the court had ruled otherwise, this may well have polarized society in the republic. He also remarked that one-third of Tatarstan's married couples were ethnically mixed, so their children's proficiency in both Tartar and Russian was a "matter of linguistic comfort."

Source: Novostoi