The Turkic languages of Soviet Muslim Asia: Russian linguistic policy

Abstract

Considering its exceptional character, scope and political as well as cultural implications, the linguistic policy adopted by the Soviet regime towards the Asian minorities of the Union has attracted surprisingly little attention either in such geographically contiguous countries as Iran, Turkey and those of the Indian sub-continent, or in Britain. Between 1953 and 1968 the main trends of the policy were followed in Central Asian Review.' Apart from this, the subject has been only sporadically handled in a few specialised publications appearing mainly in the United States and in France.2 The present article endeavours to trace the course and assess the achievements of the Soviet policy with special reference to the Turkic languages which, while they number only thirteen of the thirty tongues spoken by Muslims and classified in Soviet publications as 'languages', are used by over eighty per cent of the Muslim population of the USSR, now amounting to about 35 million. Soviet linguistic policy is the first instance of a regime aiming at the development, systematisation. and regimentation of the languages of the minority peoples under its rule. Earlier conquerors of the territories now making up a large part of Soviet Muslim Asia, such as Turks, Arabs, Mongols and Iranians, never attempted any equivalent policy; the adoption of the Arabic character and large Arabic and Persian loan vocabularies merely followed the spread of Islam and the use of Arabic and Persian for administrative purposes. British linguistic policy in the Indian sub-continent was confined to the establishment of English (mainly in deference to Indian wishes) as the medium of higher education and the higher echelons of administration, the development of a standard form of Hindi known as khari boli and the institution for use in the Indian Army of an unscientific transcription system known as 'Roman Urdu'. Linguistic policies adopted elsewhere have, broadly speaking, been of two kinds: that initiated by the government of an independent country, such as that of Turkey in 1928, in order to change or develop its national language in such respects as script and vocabulary; and that imposed by a ruling power in order to compel subject peoples to exchange their own language for another or to change them in specified ways. The only recent examples of this latter policy seem to have been that followed by Japan in Korea where the teaching of Korean in the schools was forbidden, and the temporary prohibition by the Tsarist government of the teaching of Polish in Polish schools except for the religious instruction of non-Orthodox pupils. The fact that the linguistic policy adopted by the Soviet regime towards the Asian peoples of the former Tsarist empire differed in most respects from the policies just described was due to a combination of causes. At the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917 the ideas of nationalism and the nation, which had already reached the Middle East and South Asia, had not yet burgeoned in Asiatic Russia; but in the chaos caused by the Revolution and the Civil War