In 2002 the Russian parliament passed a law requiring all official languages within the Russian Federation to use the Cyrillic alphabet. The legislation caused great controversy and anger in some quarters, especially in Tatarstan, the Russian republic whose attempt to romanise the script for the Tatar language provoked the new law. This paper examines the background to these recent events in the former Soviet Union, showing how they provide a contemporary illustration of the ways that linguistic (in this case, orthographic) issues can interact with ideologies and discourses at the political and social levels. The paper takes an approach which treats orthography and script selection as social practices which are amenable to sociolinguistic analysis, even though they are more commonly modelled as autonomous systems (or “neutral technologies”) which can be detached from their social context (cf. Street’s “ideological” and “autonomous” models of literacy). The article begins with a very brief overview of the early twentieth-century changes of script from Arabic to Roman and then to Cyrillic, which affected most of the Turkic languages, including Tatar, and an account of the trend to return to the Roman alphabet in the immediate post-Soviet period. It goes on to describe the circumstances of the decision by Tatarstan to introduce the script change, and the resulting backlash from the government of the Russian Federation, in the form of a new language law. It then goes on to analyse the discourses which underlie this story of rebellion and reaction. In particular, the following discourses are identified and discussed: unity and membership (the discourse of belonging), technology and globalisation, cultural heritage (change and permanence), Cyrillic as “defective”/Cyrillic as a conduit for Russian lexis, romanisation as a threat to the integrity of Russia and its language. It is noted that many of the discourses present in the Tatarstan case are also found in other debates over orthographies elsewhere.
2011. Urdu in Devanagari: Shifting orthographic practices and Muslim identity in Delhi. Language in Society 40:3 ► pp. 259 ff.
Angermeyer, Philipp
2014. Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron and CeilLucas (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. 912 pp. Hb (9780199744084) $150.00.. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18:1 ► pp. 125 ff.
Bahri, Soubeika
2022. Ettounsi and Tamazight Writing on Facebook: Oral Vernaculars or New Literacies. In Digital Orality, ► pp. 65 ff.
Bartholomä, Ruth
2012. »Russifizierung« in der Tatarischen ASSR. In Kampf um Wort und Schrift [Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz Beihefte, 90], ► pp. 141 ff.
Burridge, Kate & Tonya N. Stebbins
2015. For the Love of Language,
Cushman, Ellen
2011. The Cherokee Syllabary: A Writing System In Its Own Right. Written Communication 28:3 ► pp. 255 ff.
Huang, Karen
2019. Language ideologies of the transcription systemZhuyin fuhao: a symbol of Taiwanese identity. Writing Systems Research 11:2 ► pp. 159 ff.
2021. The Soviet Union as a Hybrid Civilising Project. In Russian Exceptionalism between East and West, ► pp. 101 ff.
Reagan, Timothy
2019. Conceptualizing the Ideology of Linguistic Legitimacy: ‘Primitive people have primitive languages and other nonsense’. In Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice, ► pp. 29 ff.
Robertson, Wesley C.
2024.
‘Chinese ideographs belong to a childhood age […] but Japan has now become a man’: graphic ideologies and language reform in
The Japan Times
. Japan Forum 36:1 ► pp. 78 ff.
Sebba, Mark
2009. Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research. Writing Systems Research 1:1 ► pp. 35 ff.
2016. Writing and rewriting Amazigh/Berber identity: Orthographies and language ideologies. Writing Systems Research 8:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Soulaimani, Dris
2023. Multimodal arguments: language, script, and politics. Multimodal Communication 12:3 ► pp. 245 ff.
Su, Hsi-Yao & Chen-Cheng Chun
2021. Chineseness, Taiwaneseness, and the traditional and simplified Chinese scripts:Tourism, identity, and linguistic commodification. Language & Communication 77 ► pp. 35 ff.
Verschik, Anna
2010. Contacts of Russian in the post-Soviet space. Applied Linguistics Review 1:2010 ► pp. 85 ff.
Walters, Susan Gary
2023. Nuosu script in the linguistic landscape of Xichang, China: a sociocultural subtext. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 44:10 ► pp. 928 ff.
Wigglesworth-Baker, Teresa
2018. Language Policy and Power Politics in Post-Soviet Tatarstan. In Language Planning in the Post-Communist Era, ► pp. 119 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.