Developing the Soviet Turkic Tongues: The Language of the Politics of Language

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Volume 35, Issue 3, p. 425-442

Abstract

Language planning often aims to fix the statuses, roles, and functions of languages, and hence the choices among languages that speakers and writers make. This has been called "language status planning." A second object of language policy, however, is the content and structure of languages themselves: vocabularies, sound systems, word structures, sentence structures, writing systems, and stylistic repertoires. Intervention of this kind is "language corpus planning." The Soviet distinction between the "functional development" of a language and its "internal development" or "enrichment" is parallel. Soviet language policies deal both with status problems (for example, how long and how widely should language X be used?) and with corpus problems (for example, how should language X be developed and regulated?). The Soviet Turkic languages exhibit these issues with particular complexity because of their number, their close interrelations, their similarity to a non-socialist country's language (Turkish), their dissimilarity to Russian, their pre-Soviet Arabic (if any) alphabets, and their traditions of borrowing from Arabic and Persian, associated culturally with Islam and perceived backwardness.