Uzbekistan Initiative Brief No. 19, October 2014
By Yulia Tsyryapkina
Close to Tashkent, the city of Angren is one of the main coal producing centers of Uzbekistan. Despite the Uzbekification of public life since independence, and dra-matic changes in the ethnic composition of the city—the share of the Russian popula-tion decreased from 31.4% in 1989 to 2.6% in 2013—Russian language had main-tained very strong in Angren public space. This phenomenon can be explained be-cause Russian is still indispensable in the industrial sector. With the ongoing mod-ernization of Angren extraction combines, and the new status of special industrial zone (SIZ) given to the city, the demand for Russian language could increase.
