Abstract
The article focuses on the assessment of changes in teaching of the languages of the national republics in schools by parents as participants in educational relations, using the example of the Republic of Tatarstan. In 2025, the topic was once again brought to the fore by the discussion of plans to rename the subject “Native Language” in the Federal State Educational Standard to “Language of the Russian Federation People.” The study is based on the data from a representative sociological survey conducted in 2018 by sociologists from Kazan Federal University, with a quota sample of 2,000 people from the Republic of Tatarstan, representing the region’s population by gender, age, as well as by education, ethnicity, and location (Kazan, other cities, and rural areas). The article identifies the attitudes of students’ parents regarding the use of Russian and Tatar languages and the mandatory study of these languages in schools, the discourse of the “language conflict” in the republic, the place and role of Russian, Tatar, foreign and native languages in the school curriculum, and the introduction of the mandatory subject “Native Language” in 2017. The views of students’ parents are compared to the attitudes of non-childbearing residents of the region and Tatarstan as a whole. The study revealed that the mass-scale opinion of parents was not as categorical as the rhetoric of the leaders of the “parent communities” in social networks and in the mass media. While there was a slightly greater recognition of language tensions, including tha one that appeared in 2017, grеater preference for Russian in everyday life and expectations of its increased influence in the future, parents’ opinions did not differ significantly from those of the republic’s residents, who supported the study of their native languages regardless of their political status and denied the existence of a language conflict.