History of language policy in Karelia according to documents of the scientific archive of KarRC RAS
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The article presents and analyzes documents from the Scientific Archive of the Karelian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which reflect the directions of the language policy pursued in Soviet Karelia in the pre-war period in relation to the Karelian language. Archival documents are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. Language construction in Karelia in the 1920s–1940s went through several stages, each of which developed under the influence of ideas that were conceptually antagonistic to each other. The formation of the written tradition was largely influenced by factors that had a political context. The events that influenced the fate of the Karelian language often changed too quickly and radically. In less than twenty years, Karelian writing has undergone numerous changes. This was reflected in the manuscripts of dictionaries and textbooks created in those years and remaining unpublished due to the fact that one language reform was rapidly replaced by the next. The Karelian language has gone from an oral, dialect form through the stage of the so-called “Karelian-Finnish language” to a single standardized form. The functioning time of the written standard turned out to be very short, but even during this period the rules of the language managed to change. The political situation soon required a change in language priorities, and as a result, the use of the Karelian language in official life was discontinued. The surviving manuscripts have become documentary evidence of the vicissitudes of language policy.
Source: Sociolingvistika
Author: Svetlana Viktorovna Nagurnaja
Institution: Karelian Research Centre
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4401480375