COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE LAWS ON THE STATE LANGUAGE IN THE COUNTRIES OF THE SOUTH CAUCASUS

Abstract

All three states of the South Caucasus – Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia are involved in the “European neighborhood policy”, which indicates their sharing of general European values and harmonization of current and future legislation with
the European legal system. From this point of view, their legislation on the state language is important since the state language is a means of impacting the realization of the principles of the communicative unity of the state, political consolidation, and
territorial integrity of the country.
Therefore, a comparative analysis of the development of the state language in the countries of the South Caucasus, linguistic sovereignty, human linguistic rights, and relations between the linguistic majority and the minority is relevant. The mentioned analysis will contribute to the mutual sharing of experience in the language policy of the South Caucasus countries.
The paper compares the state language legislation of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, the title and status of the law, the date and structure of the law, the preamble, the constitutional status of the state language, mandatory knowledge of the state language, areas of use of the state language, types of languages, the language of education, protection of the state language.
The paper shows that the determination of the status of the state language is one of the central and important issues in the legal regulation of language relations, as it concerns not only the normative basis of language use in the state but also the
rights of speakers of this or that language (both individuals and ethnic groups).