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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jonathan Pool
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Extract

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.

Type
Symposium
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 425 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1976

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References

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34. Ibid., pp. 18-19. Those not cited are nos. 1, 5, 11, and 13.

35. G. G. Ismailova, “K istorii azerbaidzhanskogo alfavita,” in Voprosy sovershenstvovaniia, pp. 36-38. Cf. the complaint about the contemporary Turkmen alphabet not reflecting that language's distinction between long and short vowels: B. Charyiarov, “Iz istorii turkmenskogo alfavita,” in Voprosy sovershenstvovaniia, pp. 153-54.

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49. Shiraliev and Ragimov, “Azerbaidzhanskii iazyk,” p. 238.

50. Gasymov, As. dili term., pp. 165-70; cf. David Nissman, “Is the Influence of Russian Orthography on the Wane in Azerbaidzhan?,” Radio Liberty Dispatch, February 16, 1971.

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61. Khanazarov and Guliamova, “Dal'neishee razvitie,” p. 48.

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63. Baskakov et al., “O sovremennom sostoianii,” p. 168.

64. Shiraliiev, “Dil,” p. 7. For Slavic languages, extreme authenticism can take the form of choosing, from among indigenous synonyms, that which is most dissimilar to Russian; see Wexler, Purism, pp. 50-51, 213, 231.

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79. Vil’ Lipatov, “Slovo v opasnosti … ,” Literaturnaia gazeta, August 18, 1971.

80. Gasymov, As. dili term., p. 116.

81. Ibid., p. 94. Cf. Wexler, Purism, p. 318: “Enthusiasm for native resources is expressed through a variety of criteria which can be applied arbitrarily, whenever the occasion permits.”

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84. See Edelman, Murray, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana, 111., 1964)Google Scholar, chapters 3 and 7.