![]() ![]() I begin with a review of language policy from Tsarist times through today’s Russia. I find that the Russian language is prestigious in all fourteen former Soviet Union states because of its use regionally as a lingua franca. He found that only Belarus maintains a significant enough number of Russian speakers to fall into one of his categories. He applied this theory to Russian in the states of the former Soviet Union. Nicholas Ostler, a linguist and language historian, categorized four reasons why an imperial language would remain after the colonizing power leaves. The prestige of the Russian language has changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. After an outline of convergent and divergent processes in the formation of possible non-dominant varieties of Russian, the case study will focus on the Russian of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. ![]() Such a circumstance accelerates the process of breaking-up of a ‘unitary’, well standardized Russian, thus creating the conditions for the forming of potential ‘national’ varieties of Russian-s (cf. Nonetheless the fundamental common feature which characterize the new sociolinguistic panorama of the former CIS states is that Russian, even where it preserves an official status, is less subject to a Russian-Russian (Moscow) norm setting-centre than in the Soviet period. There are multiple extra-linguistic reasons for the attention paid to the current developments of Russian in the different Euro-Asian states. Yet, after initial enthusiasm for the revival of national languages, particularly active in the 1990s, a renewed awareness of the functioning of Russian can be attested. Here, Russian has co-existed alongside several ethnic-historical languages, as the main language of ‘interethnic’ and / or ‘intranational’ communication, until well after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The language situation of the Post-Soviet states is particularly interesting to the linguist and sociolinguist. ![]()
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