The Problem of the Establishment of a Legitimate Language on the Example of the Introduction of Latin Graphics in the Mongolian People’s Republic during the 1930s

Abstract

In this article, the adoption of a legitimate language by the Mongolian People’s Republic following the language reform of the 1930s, which involved the switch to the Latin script, is considered. The language policy pursued by the MPR in the early 20th century is investigated from the perspective of the legitimate language theory. By that period, the traditional Mongolian script had become outdated and needed to be reformed. Furthermore, the illiteracy rate among Mongolian people was very high, and the old Mongolian script was difficult to study. Another reason is that the language turned into the main tool for promoting the new cultural and ideological values of the USSR. Thus, the shift of Mongolia to the writing system based on the Latin alphabet was a political phenomenon and played a key role in broadcasting the cultural policy of the new state. In the early years of the MPR, the Latin-based writing solved several problems at once: it promoted literacy among Mongolian people, gave greater publicity to the policy of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party and the new culture, and became a platform to bring together Mongolia and the USSR. To substantiate the importance of the Latin graphics as the official state script, Pierre Bourdieu’s “Language and Symbolic Power” is analyzed, in which the author discusses the origin of the legitimate language and script, as well as their role in the process of nation building. Here, the documents in both Russian and Mongolian are also examined. The obtained results demonstrate that, despite various difficulties, the Latin script was adopted for a quite short period of time as legitimate in the MPR, which had a great influence on the development of the socialist culture and the Mongolian national identity.