The ABCs of Tatar: multilingual accommodation and Soviet language politics

Abstract

This article draws on communication accommodation theory to explain Soviet language policies during the 1920s and 1930s and their effects on Volga Tatars, a large and vibrant member of the family of Soviet nationalities. During the first two decades of Communist rule, various reforms changed the alphabet of the Tatar language, first from Arabic to Latin and then to a Cyrillic script, reflecting the different visions, emerging from both the centre and periphery, for incorporating non-Russian nationalities into Soviet society. In spite of the shifting objectives of these projects, we note how a heavily involved state actor used its substantial resources to incentivise convergence and punish divergence, eventually eliminating the latter as a feasible alternative for accommodating in a socialist regime.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.