In an online post on the tiny Turkmen corner of TikTok earlier this month, a user introducing herself as a female singer complained of being language-shamed during an interview for a gig at a restaurant in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan.
"The manager of the cafe spoke in Russian, so I replied in Russian," the singer wrote on the video-sharing platform, before detailing how the manager asked her: "You speak Russian so badly, are you sure you can sing?"
"Should all singers know Russian?" the TikTok user asked her subscribers -- in Turkmen.
"I think it's important to respect each other because I am not telling [the manager] that a person who lives in Turkmenistan should know Turkmen."
The video garnered nearly 70,000 likes in a week and racked up more than 500 largely sympathetic comments.
Many were adamant that the shame was the restaurant manager's alone: If you live in Turkmenistan, you should speak Turkmen.
As is so often the case with Turkmenistan, the details underpinning the post were impossible to verify.
Nevertheless, its resonance indicated a persisting truth: Despite fading dramatically from public life in Turkmenistan in the first three decades of post-Soviet independence, the Russian language can still be a source of snobbery and contention.
This month, the Dunya Turkmenleri (Turkmen of the World) weekly program produced by RFE/RL's Turkmen Service is publishing a series of talks looking at current and historical trends of Russian-language usage in a country that remains the most authoritarian and isolated of all the 15 republics that became independent countries after the Soviet collapse.
The insights show that while Russia is definitely "down" in the country that pursued "Turkmenization" rapidly after independence, it is not yet out.
The Great Pandemic-Era, Russian-Language School Panic
Serdar Berdymukhammedov made Russia his first foreign visit on June 10, 2022, less than three months after replacing his father, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, as president of Turkmenistan.
Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked his visiting counterpart during their talks for "the country's caring attitude toward the Russian language and culture."
Putin also name-checked a Russian-Turkmen School in Ashgabat named after wordsmith Aleksandr Pushkin. The school uses a Russian curriculum and is a popular destination for children of the local political elite, according to RFE/RL's Turkmen Service.
The new Turkmen leader suggested furthering cooperation in education with the creation of a Russian-Turkmen university, a proposal that "was met with full understanding and support from [Putin]," according to a report by Russia's TASS news agency.
The tone of those exchanges was quite different from the alarmist headlines in the Russian press at the beginning of the school year in 2020, when it appeared that what remained of Russian-language education in Turkmenistan might be heading for an exit.
RFE/RL's Turkmen Service reported then that an order went out demanding ethnic Turkmen employees of law enforcement agencies transfer their children to Turkmen-language schools.
Parents at schools with Russian instruction in the capital, meanwhile, were reporting dramatic reductions in Russian-language class time and -- in many cases -- the end of all Russian-language classes.
Turkmenistan's government failed to explain the situation and no official order was made on the end of Russian-language education in the country.
But pro-Kremlin media outlets in Russia drew their own conclusions.
"Without the Russian language, Turkmenistan is plunging into the Middle Ages," screamed one such publication, Vzglyad.
Vzglyad's article quoted a fairly moderate statement of concern from the Russian Embassy in Turkmenistan, which cited Turkmen authorities as informing the embassy that Russian-language classes were being closed due to difficulties enforcing sanitary norms in those classes during the coronavirus pandemic.
The embassy said it had expressed regret over the Turkmen officials' actions in the context of a dissemination of the Russian language in Turkmenistan and the Turkmen language in Russia.
Whether due to pressure from Moscow or pressure from disappointed parents whose children were struggling to adapt to Turkmen, schools with full or partial Russian-language instruction weathered the storm.
And there are still dozens open to this day, mostly in Ashgabat. Moreover, they are still in very high demand.
Closing 'Windows' For Russian Speakers
The Turkmen government promoted the dominance of the Turkmen language intensely from the early years of independence, with Russian losing its status as a language of interethnic communication in 1992. That same year, pro-government Russian-language newspapers in Turkmenistan were imploring their readers to learn Turkmen, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
The following year, Russian-language state television broadcasts in Turkmenistan were cut to a few hours a day, while state radio broadcasts in Russian ceased entirely by 2000.
Ethnic Russians left the country by the tens and then hundreds of thousands, although seemingly deliberate bureaucratic obstacles imposed by the authorities in the mid-1990s stemmed the flow somewhat.
Today, other than Russian-speaking communities in Ashgabat, notable pockets of Russian-speakers exist in the western Turkmen cities of Turkmenbashi and Balkanabat.
In fact, at Turkmenbashi's Kenar bazaar, "only Russian is spoken," according to RFE/RL's correspondent in Balkan Province.
And while Russian television channels -- typically accessed via satellite dish -- remain popular across the country, according to correspondents of RFE/RL's Turkmen Service, it is in this city on the Caspian coast that they are well ahead of the competition.
Turkmenbashi, a town of less than 100,000 people, was captured by Russian imperial forces in 1869 and became an important staging post for attacks on the Silk Road cities of Khiva and Bukhara in modern day Uzbekistan.
The Russians named the settlement Krasnovodsk, a translation from its prior Turkmen name, Kyzyl-Su.
That designation survived for nearly 125 years before Turkmenistan's self-aggrandizing first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, gave it in 1993 the same name he gave himself, Turkmenbashi (Father of the Turkmen).
But the persistence of the Russian language in Turkmenbashi and Balkanabat is explained by the relatively cosmopolitan populations in those cities, which, whilst mostly Turkmen, also include notable Azeri, Armenian, and Slavic minorities.
And despite the significant local demand of Russian, the supply of teachers is limited and it is mostly taught only as a foreign language.
RFE/RL's Balkan Province correspondent also reported textbook shortages as one key problem.
The correspondent added that weekly teaching of the Russian language in the province has been reduced from six hours to two hours in most schools, with only older age groups getting three hours a week.
In comparison to other Central Asian countries, Turkmenistan is now certainly the most ethnically homogenous.
Authorities' decision to revoke a bilateral agreement recognizing dual citizenship in 2003 saw another wave of Russian speakers leave as they were suddenly forced to choose between the two countries.
But Serdar Berdymukhammedov's visit to Russia in 2022 saw Turkmen officials return to issuing travel passports to residents who had dual Turkmen-Russian citizenship, allowing Turkmen citizens who obtained Russian citizenship after 2003 to apply for Turkmen passports after almost two decades of waiting.
Migration Trends A Boost For Russian?
Russia's Rossotrudnichestvo agency, charged with promoting Russian language and culture abroad, stated last year that 40 percent of the population of Turkmenistan can speak or understand Russian -- less than any of the other four Central Asian countries. The agency also claimed that as much as 12 percent of the Turkmen population still views the language as a mother tongue.
Wherever that data came from, it wasn't Turkmenistan's most recent census, which no longer contains data on ethnic or linguistic minority groups.
Easier to see is the fact that Russia has lost ground as a second language of Turkmen citizens to Turkish, which is close to Turkmen and therefore easier to learn, especially after Turkmenistan shifted to the Latin alphabet in 1993.
Then there is Turkmen migration to Turkey, a standout trend in Central Asia in recent years.
In September 2022, some 230,000 Turkmen had valid Turkish resident permits or work visas, according to Turkish officials.
That is a huge proportion of an official national population of 7 million -- a figure analysts view as a vast exaggeration by the Turkmen government that ignores massive migration from the country due to an abysmal economy and a society severely lacking basic freedoms.
It is many times the number of Turkmen citizens in Russia, which in response to Turkmenistan's own closed-door travel policies does not allow nationals from the country to enter its territory without a visa.
But these numbers are now shifting, after Turkey decided to end visa-free travel for Turkmen at Ashgabat's request.
The numbers of Turkmen officially living in Turkey dipped below 200,000 last year. It is not clear how many are there unofficially.
And as deportations of Turkmen to their homeland for supposed migration violations have picked up pace, the number traveling to Russia are growing monthly -- a trend that could boost the amount of Russian-learning.
In the summer of 2023, Russia's embassy also announced that up to 300 places would be available for Turkmen to study at its universities -- more than in the past and with a new, simplified application procedure.
One thing that has thus far not occurred in Turkmenistan that has colored debates surrounding the Russian language in other former Soviet countries, is opposition to Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Turkmenistan's general information isolation -- which includes very controlled access to the Internet, which is also one of the world's slowest -- means the war is not discussed at any public or national level.
But at the end of 2022, RFE/RL's Turkmen Service reported on a concerted campaign by officials from the education, interior, and national security ministries to convince young people that "American and European media information" had caused the Ukrainian war.
In the policy-drafting ranks of the latter two ministries, according to an RFE/RL correspondent that contributed to Dunya Turkmenleri's series, the ability to speak Russian remains essential, rather than optional.
"They are sent on business trips to the Russian Federation to improve their skills," the correspondent said, citing sources in the two ministries.
