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MINSK () -- The president of Belarus says he speaks the former Soviet republic's rarely-used state language badly because it cannot be compared to the world's two "great languages" -- English and Russian.
Alexander Lukashenko came under fire in newspapers Wednesday for failing to support the Belarussian tongue -- spoken regularly by just a small minority of the country's 10 million people who have conversed in Russian for decades.
"People fluent in Belarussian can do nothing once they start speaking it," said Lukashenko. "You cannot express anything of significance. Belarussian is a poor language. There are only two great languages in the world -- Russian and English."
Blow to Belarussian
16 December 1994
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