CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Lancaster E-Prints Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR Mark Sebba, Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University Published as: Sebba, Mark. Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR. Language Problems & Language Planning, Volume 30, Number 2, 2006, pp. 99-125(27) http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/lplp/2006/00000030/00000002/art00001 Brief biography Mark Sebba Mark Sebba has worked in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University since 1989. He is currently Reader in Sociolinguistics and Language Contact His interests include language contact, bilingualism, corpus linguistics and orthography. His previous publications include The Syntax of Serial Verbs (John Benjamins, 1987), a study of verb forms in creoles, West African and other languages, London Jamaican (Longman, 1993), on the language of young Caribbeans born in London and Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (Macmillan, 1997). He is working on a book on the sociolinguistics of orthography around the world. 1 Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR Abstract In November 2002 the Russian parliament passed a law requiring all official languages within the Russian Federation to use the Cyrillic alphabet. The legislation caused great controversy and anger in some quarters, especially in Tatarstan, the Russian republic whose attempt to Romanise the script for the Tatar language provoked the new law. This paper examines the background to these recent events in the former Soviet Union, showing how they provide a contemporary illustration of the ways that linguistic (specifically: orthographic) issues can interact with ideologies and discourses at the political and social levels. The paper takes a approach which treats orthography (and script selection) as social practices which are amenable to sociolinguistic analysis, even though they may be modelled as autonomous systems (or „neutral technologies‟) which can be detached from their social context (cf. Street‟s „ideological‟ and „autonomous‟ models of literacy (1984)). I begin with a very brief overview of the early 20th Century changes of script from Arabic to Roman and then to Cyrillic, which affected most of the Turkic languages, including Tatar, and an account of the trend to return to the Roman alphabet in the immediate post-Soviet period. I go on to describe the circumstances of the decision by Tatarstan to introduce the script change, and the resulting backlash from the government of the Russian Federation, in the form of a new language law. I then go on to analyse the discourses which underlie this story of rebellion and reaction. In particular, the following discourses are identified and discussed: unity and membership (the discourse of belonging); technology and globalisation; cultural heritage (change and permanence); Cyrillic as „defective‟ / Cyrillic as a conduit for Russian lexis; Romanisation as a threat to the integrity of Russia and its language. It is noted that many of the discourses present in the Tatarstan case are also found in other debates over orthographies elsewhere. 2 Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR RUSSIAN LANGUAGES MUST USE SAME SCRIPT The Russian lower house of parliament, the Duma, has adopted a law requiring all state languages in Russia to be based on the Cyrillic alphabet. Russian TV said deputies made the move because they believe that using the same alphabet will unite the country. Regions still wanting their languages to use the Latin alphabet will need to apply for a separate federal law. One opponent of the change said that no Tsar, nor even Ivan the Terrible had tried to „attack the people‟s writing‟ (BBC Monitoring report, CEEFAX p. 143 6th June 2002) Introduction In November 2002 the Russian parliament passed a law requiring all official languages within the Russian Federation to use the Cyrillic alphabet. The legislation caused great controversy and anger in some quarters, especially in Tatarstan, the semi-autonomous republic within the Russian Federation whose switch from Cyrillic to Latin1 script provoked the new law. Even the international media gave it some attention. This script change, and the events which followed, provide a compelling contemporary illustration of the ways that linguistic (specifically: orthographic) issues can interact with ideologies at the political and social levels. The problematisation of orthography is widely reported in contemporary languages, for example Dutch (Geerts et al. 1977, Jacobs 1997) Portuguese (Garcez 1995), German (Johnson 2002, 2005) and French (Catach 1991). Disputes erupt not just over script changes and root-and-branch spelling reforms, but even over apparently minor matters such as the spelling of loan words and the use of diacritics. For much of the 20th century, linguists tended to see such disputes as battles between the enlightened (linguists) and the uninformed (the masses). Their attention was focussed solely on the 1 Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR linguistic efficiency of the proposals2. Since the 1970s, however, a number of scholars have chosen to study such controversies in terms of their discourse. For example, Rothstein (1977) examines the debate over Polish orthographic reforms of the 1930s by looking at the rhetoric of contemporary newspapers. Geerts et al. (1977) do likewise for the Dutch spelling controversies of the mid-20th century, while Garcez discusses the arguments which surrounded the 1990 „orthographic accord‟ between the Portuguese-speaking countries. Within this tradition, researchers have increasingly laid emphasis on the ideological nature of the issues (e.g. Garcez (1995), Jaffe (1996), Sebba (1998), (Johnson 2002, 2005). National and ethnic identities are frequently what are really at stake in these controversies. For example, Johnson (2000:120) notes that via a „discursive drift,‟ what was ostensibly a dispute about the orthography of German turned into a debate about Germany itself. „What was clearly at stake [..] was the German language in all its force as a signifier of cultural and national identity‟. In disputes over Haitian orthography (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994) choice of orthography is seen as reflecting an orientation to the Francophone world on the one hand, or to independence and anti-colonialism on the other. Similarly, in Galicia, an autonomous region of Spain, according to Herrero Valeiro (1993), choice of orthographic conventions reflects alignment with a discourse of „differentialism‟ („Galician is a language independent of Portuguese‟), or of „reintegrationism‟ („there is no linguistic basis for calling Galician an independent language from Portuguese‟) in various degrees. Looking at the way that script and spelling issues are debated around the world, we find that orthographies readily take on symbolism which extends far beyond the mechanics of a writing system; debates on orthography become symbolic battles over aspects of national, regional or ethnic identity. In the words of Schieffelin and Doucet (1994:176), „orthographic debates are rich sites for investigating competing nationalist discourses.‟ 2 Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR Eira (1998) takes the notion of „competing discourses‟ as fundamental to understanding choices and disputes over orthography. „Disagreement and imposed change can be explained in terms of conflict within or between discourses; choices which appear inexpedient according to the framework of one discourse become comprehensible from the perspective of the discourse that motivates them‟ (1998: 171). The row over scripts for Tatarstan is, as such disputes go, one of the most highly politicised, and hence interesting to study from the point of view of conflicting discourses. This will be the approach taken in the analytical part of this paper. The paper is organised as follows. In the remainder of Section 1, I give first a brief historical overview and then a more detailed account of the history of orthography in the relevant regions over the last century, up to the end of the Soviet period. In Section 2, I describe the moves among speakers of Turkic languages to return to the Latin alphabet in the immediate post-Soviet period. Section 3 deals with the decision by Tatarstan to introduce the script change, and the resulting backlash from the government of the Russian Federation, in the form of a new language law. In Section 4, „Orthography and discourse‟, I examine the Tatarstan script dispute in terms of its discourse around certain recurrent themes. Section 5 is the conclusion. 1.1 Historical overview Imperial expansion during Tsarist times meant that the Russian Empire included a great many non- Russian peoples, some of whom had long traditions of literacy in their own languages, while others had no written language of their own. In particular, along its southern flank, the Russian Empire incorporated a swathe of peoples, mainly Muslim and speakers of closely related Turkic language varieties, living in what have today become independent countries (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan), or autonomous parts of the Russian Federation (Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva) or parts of other states which made up the former 3 Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR USSR (the Crimean Tatars in what is now Ukraine, the Karakalpaks in an autonomous region of Uzbekistan). The past century has been a period of orthographic instability for these regions. During the Tsarist period, the Turkic languages mainly used the Arabic script. During the 1920s, there was an ambitious programme of alphabetic reform which led to the introduction of Latin script for all of them by 1930. Scarcely had this programme become effective, when the Latin script was replaced by Cyrillic in the late 1930s, a move which is inextricably linked to Stalin and his policies towards the non-Russian population of the USSR. Thus the Latin script, in use for only about a decade, served as transitional between the Arabic and the Cyrillic, and three scripts were in use in the space of a single generation.