Language and its social functions in early soviet thought

Abstract

The materials presented in the current issue originated as papers presented at the conference Sociological Theories of Language in the USSR, 1917-1938 held at the Bakhtin Centre and Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK, in September 2006. l The selected papers highlight various aspects of the shift towards what might be described as a functional approach to language studies during the first two decades after the October Revolution. Each in their own way shows how empirical data accumulated during the previous era of unchallenged descriptive methodology was reworked according to a new agenda, as massive practical projects drove funding decisions and research agendas more generally. New projects to catalogue and categorise linguistic phenomena were launched with the explicit purpose of spreading literacy and facilitating the development of hitherto marginalised social groups. Of course, the shift towards a linguistic science driven by social and political considerations was in no way limited to the USSR at the time, but it was precisely there that the new orientation was carried through to its full extent and articulated in a self-conscious fashion. The reformulation of language studies acquired a particularly topical significance in the debates surrounding the national question, where the issue of relations between the imperial Russian language and hitherto subjugated local languages had long been a concern of both Party leaders and linguists alike (e.g., Lenin 1983 [1914]; Boduen de Kurtene and Baudouin de Courtenay 1906, 1913; Smith 1998; Hirsch 2005). However, debates around language acquired a more general topicality in the context of widespread concern over the large number of physically and