Comparison of language ideologies in the Soviet Union and selected successor states (Estonia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia) - continuity, ruptures, reorientations

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Monika Wingender
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 492769567

The developments in language ideologies in the successor states of the Soviet Union have revealed intense changes in recent years. The turning point in language policy and the break with the ideology of equality of languages in multilingual Russia in 2018 makes this very clear. Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine reveals further developments in language ideologies. The proposed renewal project aims to investigate the effects of conflict and violence, especially in the form of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, on language situations and language ideologies of selected successor states of the USSR, to trace the different ways in which the Soviet legacy is dealt with in language situations, and thus to analyze the development of their language ideologies from the Soviet Union to the present day in terms of continuity, ruptures, and reorientation. This application is a renewal proposal based on the results of the project "Comparison of language ideologies in the Soviet Union and today's Russian Federation - continuity, breaks, reorientations". The results to date reveal different phases and several key topics of language ideologies. The ideology of Russian as a "rodnoy jazyk" is fundamental. Other themes are: Russian language as a soft power, as a factor of national security, as one of the traditional values, and, most recently established in the constitutional amendment, as a "state-building" factor. Many of the other topics concern the "Russkij Mir" ideology. In the renewal project, the multilingual RF remains one of the case studies - on the basis of the previous project, we can concentrate on the latest developments. In order to reveal how the Soviet legacy is dealt with in the language situations, we expand the case studies to include Estonia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The four case studies reveal clear differences in the treatment of the Soviet legacy, in the effects of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine on language ideologies, and in the development of dealing with the global language English. Accordingly, the extensive triangulated corpus (official documents, language-related expert discourses and public discourses) will be significantly expanded. Guided interviews will be conducted for all case studies. In terms of data analysis methods, the project will continue to rely on discourse analyses of language ideologies and on conceptual approaches in the form of the key topics of language ideologies. In addition, analyses of linguistic landscaping and methods of multimodal discourse analysis are included. By comparing the Soviet Union with selected of its successor states, the project aims to reveal the continuation, reinterpretation or recontextualization of language ideologies on the basis of a longitudinal study.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants