Soviet Language Policy: Historical Development and Impact on Ethnic Groups and Languages

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.46991/TSTP/2026.SI.3.033

Keywords:

language policy, Soviet Union, korenizatsiya, russification, minority languages

Abstract

This article examines Soviet language policy from 1917 to 1991. The analysis identifies a transition from the early promotion of national languages under korenizatsiya to a later system in which Russian assumed broader functions in interethnic communication, education, administration, science, and professional mobility. The study finds that this process generally increased Russian-language competence while producing diverse outcomes for titular and minority languages. Ukraine illustrates changing institutional conditions for Ukrainian, including the expansion of Ukrainian-language schooling and publishing during the 1920s, subsequent orthographic revision, and the growth of Russian-medium education in later decades. The Caucasian cases demonstrate the importance of local conditions: Armenian and Georgian retained extensive institutional functions, whereas Azerbaijani experienced repeated script changes and smaller languages had more limited support. The findings suggest that Soviet language policy generated patterns of bilingualism and language maintenance or shift that varied according to institutional, demographic, and cultural factors.

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Author Biographies

  • Maria Plotnikova, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N.Yeltsin

    PhD in Philology, Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin, Russia. Her research lies at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, political linguistics, language policy and ecology, and translation studies, with a particular focus on metaphorical modeling and media studies. She actively contributes to academic conferences on translation, linguistics, and literary studies, and co-organizes the annual international conference “Current Issues in Translation, Linguistics, Literary History, and Folklore” at Ural Federal University.

  • Anna Sumskaya, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N.Yeltsin

    Doctor of Philology and PhD in Pedagogical Sciences, Professor at the Department of Periodical Press and Online Media, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin, Russia. Her research focuses on media generations, transmedia communication, digitalization, media practices, communicative and cultural memory, and the transformation of journalism in the digital age. Her studies combine media theory with interdisciplinary and qualitative approaches, including in-depth interviews and lexical-statistical analysis. She supervises the Faculty of Journalism’s master’s programmes in media communications.

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Published

2026-09-25

Issue

Re-thinking Soviet Translation Studies

Section

Part I: Re-thinking Translation History from the Periphery

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Copyright (c) 2026 Maria Plotnikova, Anna Sumskaya

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Plotnikova, Maria, and Anna Sumskaya. 2026. “Soviet Language Policy: Historical Development and Impact on Ethnic Groups and Languages”. Translation Studies: Theory and Practice 3 (September): 33-50. https://doi.org/10.46991/TSTP/2026.SI.3.033.