Soviet union policies regarding language corpus planning

Language planning in the Soviet Union

The policies regarding language corpus planning throughout the extensive territory under the Soviet Union has been marked by an incoherence and inconsistency mostly dictated by the politic of divide and rule.

Given the vast state of which the Soviet Union was composed with very high divergence in its population regarding nationalities, languages or variety of languages, language planning proved to be a very sensitive issue. In order to prevent the formation of large blocks, the government had imposed a policy of Russification, where Russian acted as a Lingua Franca. This was done by promoting regional languages. There were deliberate imposed attempts to stress as many differences as possible among the various languages of the area. Hence, local and regional languages were actively encouraged and the use of Russian legitimized.

So as the as to cut the Muslim people of the Central Asia off from Arabic, Turkish and the Persian influences Cyrillic script was imposed ad extended to nearly all the languages of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Arabic, Hebrew and German were banned from state support.

However, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Yougoslavia presents itself as a good example of problems faced by this Russian societies, which had previously formed part of the Soviet Union Block regarding language problems in population showing great diversity in religion, etnicity, origins and language itself.