Last week, Russia's State Duma has passed a bill on studying native languages of Russian peoples in the third and final reading.
According to the bill, federal standards of primary school education in Russia now provide an option to be educated in languages spoken by the peoples living in Russia and official state languages of Russia’s federal subjects, including Russian language.
Russian language may be freely chosen as the native language by the family of a student.
It is noteworthy that this rule will concern not only schools, but also kindergartens.
There are 58 different languages which are used in Russia's education system, federal educational programs are approved for 13 national languages. There are 36 different languages which are considered official languages in various regions of Russia, along with Russian. There are over 250 minority dialects spoken in Russia today.
