The recent marriage of the study of nationalism and ethnicity with sociolinguistics resulted in a steady outflow of insightful works that probe the political uses of language in various regions of the world. This novel field originated with Joshua A. Fishman’s seminal Language and Nationalism (1972),^[1] duly quoted in the reviewed book. Two years later, Fishman founded the renowned International Journal of the Sociology of Language that definitively tore down disciplinary barriers between linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and political science. During the 1980s, and especially after the fall of communism, numerous case studies on language and politics followed.^[2]
Jacob Landau and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele’s study zooms in on the distant (from the Western vantage) landlocked region of the Eurasian landmass. The authors of this collection have produced an insightful academic work that explores the uses of language and script for the processes of nation- and nation-state-building. This crucial political-cum-linguistic aspect of statehood and nationhood legitimization is often left out from other publications on this region and only the book under review has been solely devoted to this issue. This makes it required reading for political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars who wish to understand what has happened in post-Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
After the general presentation of the 20th-century social, economic, and demographic realities in the six newly emerged nation-states (Chapter 2), the authors devote the entire Chapter 3 to the Russian (Russian-speaking) diaspora in Central Asia. At the beginning of the 1990s, Russians and other Slavs accounted for half of Kazakhstan’s population, but never were they more than 60,000 to 80,000 in six-million-strong Tajikistan. On the one hand, this diaspora provides justification for Russia’s continued military presence in Central Asia; on the other hand, the presence of the Russophone population coaxed the shift of the Kazakhstani capital from Almaty to northern Astana in order to speed up ethnic Kazakhization of northern Kazakhstan. In 2004, a similar political end was met by concentrated administrative pressure exerted on Turkmenistan’s ethnically non-Turkmen Russian-speakers either to leave for Russia or get Turkmenized. In fact, Turkmenistan’s official policy of neutrality is nothing more than a deft cover-up for the authoritarian manner of nation-state-building carried out by Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbasha (Father of Turkmens), who recently replaced the Bible and the Koran with his new Holy Writ of Ruhnama. It is noteworthy that despite the official rhetoric of Turkmenization, he wrote in Russian this compulsory reading for civil servants and students.
The political and historical detours inescapable, Chapter 3 offers a brief overview of Soviet language and culture policies that in the 1920s and 1930s created six new nations (or, nationalities, as they were termed in the Soviet nomenclature) out of a population that identified itself primarily with Islam and their localities or nomadic clans rather than with any extant states. “Nation” was a novel idea that did not catch on yet even in 1991, when the Alma Ata (Almaty) conference of the first secretaries of the Central Asian Soviet republics demanded preservation of the Soviet Union after the unilateral decision of Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich to dissolve it. Landau and Kellner-Heinkele sketch the process in the course of which, during the 1920s, the Central Asian Turkic lingua franca of Chaghatay was replaced with Kazak, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek, whereas Indo-European Persian was transformed into Tajik, and Azeri was cut out from the erstwhile commonality of Osmanlıca (Ottoman Turkish). In many regards, this story complements Terry Martin’s groundbreaking work, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (2001), which concentrated on Russia and Ukraine in presenting the early Soviet policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization), that is, nation-building sponsored by the Kremlin.^[3]
In their creation of new nations through the codification of brand new languages, Soviet social engineers closely followed Stalin’s ideas (borrowed from Austria-Hungary) that equated language with nationality, that is, nation and/or the state belonging to a nation. Sadly, these episodes escaped the authors’ attention. Distancing Central Asia and Azerbaijan from their ethnic and religious kin was achieved by Moscow through the imposition of the “progressive and modern” Latin alphabet that Soviet propaganda sharply contrasted with the “backward” Arabic script. Surprisingly, Landau and Kellner-Heinkele do not refer to Khansuvarov’s famous work, Latinization: The Weapon of Leninist National Politics (1932), which interpreted and justified this Soviet policy as one compliant with the cultural unification of the Soviet polity.^[4] When, in 1928, Ankara followed the same line through the introduction of the Latin script for newly standardized (that is, de-Arabianized and de-Persianized) Turkish, the Kremlin swiftly replaced the Latin characters with different kinds of the Cyrillic for the six languages (Azeri, Kazak, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek) in the late 1930s.
The French scholar Oliver Roy aptly analyzed the socio-cultural dynamics of these changes and its influence on the current situation in his New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (2000).^[5] It is not included in the bibliography, though Roy’s insights could clarify the mechanism of sociolinguistic engineering in Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan all too sketchily described by Landau and Kellner-Heinkele. There is also no mention of Asimova’s classic Language Building in Tajikistan, 1920-1940 (1982). This unjustly forgotten monograph clearly explicates how the Tajik language was constructed to make it different (mainly in script and Russian linguistic loans) from Persian, with actually both languages remaining then identical. Asimova emphasizes that Tajik did not emerge in the usual helter-skelter process of cultural exchanges, but was engineered in line with the overarching Soviet policy of language building.^[6]
The stasis of the Soviet period 1945-1991 was marked by further Sovietization and Russification of all the concerned languages, especially, starting from the 1970s, when Russian became de facto the official language. In 1971, Brezhnev claimed that the goal of the “new historical community of sovetskii narod” (Soviet people or nation) was to build communism and a common language (a codeword for Russian). The edinstvo (unity) of the Soviet people was ensured by the “integration of distinct Soviet nationalities” mainly through Russification. The sharp reversal of this policy took place in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, when it turned out that initially imposed independence could not be reverted in Central Asia and Azerbaijan.
The six tentative nations of Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan hardened into lasting and self-conscious sociopolitical entities. This is the main topic of the work, which the authors cover in Chapters 5 to 10. Erstwhile first secretaries turned presidents on their own had to decide on language politics that would befit best their ethnically defined nation-states. The first step presupposed de-Russification and the shift from Russian monolingualism or Russian-local language bilingualism to monolingual or bilingual sociopolitical dominance of the local language elevated to the status of the national and official language (Chapter 5). This change was achieved through a torrent of language legislation, which, ironically, was issued mainly in Russian (Chapter 6). The symbolic bone of contention of greatest importance was the question of retaining Cyrillic. Eventually, this script was replaced with brand new Latin alphabets for Azeri (1991), Turkmen (1993) and Uzbek (1995). These scripts do not correspond to the Soviet Latin alphabets used for writing in these languages during the 1920s and 1930s. The first half of the 1990s was also the period when Ankara endeavored to create a Pan-Turkic language or, at least a common Pan-Turkic alphabet (much to Russia’s chagrin), but to no avail. Once unleashed, ethnic nationalisms could not be returned to some ideal Turkic cultural-cum-political commonality. Bishkek adopted a Latin script for Kyrgyz in 2000, when the Pan-Turkic initiative was over, and this act did not alienate Kyrgyzstan from Moscow. The Cyrillic was retained in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, because the former did not wish to alienate its huge Russian-speaking population, while the latter feared that proposed re-adoption of the Arabic alphabet would mean the end of the Tajik language, which, in aspects other than script, is almost identical with Iran’s official Farsi (Persian) (Chapter 7). These latest developments, unfortunately, were not elucidated in the book, since the authors drew exclusively on their fieldwork, terminated in 1998.
Having systematically, state by state, presented new language policies and their implementation (Chapter 5) as well as laws issued to underlay these policies (Chapter 6) and their introduction at the level of the script (Chapter 7), Landau and Kellner-Heinkele concentrate on what all this meant at the micro-level of language codification and use. As shown in Chapter 8, new orthographies bred serious linguistic-cum-political altercations, faced serious technical problems (especially, lack of novel fonts in typewriters and word processors), and posed the question if and how thoroughly to de-Russify the national lexicons. Chapter 9 analyzes how successful was the introduction of the newly standardized national languages to schools and administration. The most progress in this respect was made in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan – the states that early on decided on full independence in the sphere of national culture and could draw on the terminological cornucopia offered by cognate Turkish. The same policy was pursued in the case of Tajik, with Farsi serving the role of a non-Russian cognate language from which to draw words and phrases in order to replace Russian ones. Belatedly (largely due to the self-imposed isolation of Turkmenistan and the impoverishment inside it), Turkmen followed the course taken by Azeri, Kazak, and Uzbek. This put Kyrgyz at a disadvantage, because of disagreement over Turkish linguistic loans replacing their Russian counterparts. There was also next to nothing of a Kyrgyz-language literature to fall back on.
In their conclusive chapter, Landau and Kellner-Heinkele stress that the policies of nation- and nation-state-building pursued in post-Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan are the logical continuation of the Soviets’ ideological fixation on language as the sole justification of the existence of nations/nation-states. Thus ethno-linguistic nationalism (so popular in Central and Eastern Europe) was in a way exported to Central Asia, though the vast majority of the postcolonial nation-states worldwide are steeped in civic nationalism. The sociopolitical intensity of ethnolinguistic nation- and nation-building is high, that is, it requires costly and politically dangerous (because frequently forced) ethnolinguistic homogenization, while the concerned nation-states are relatively poor and their governments are often considered to be illegitimate. Hence, the shift from the Cyrillic to the Latin script has not been completed yet and Cyrillic-based textbooks and computer programs earmarked for state administration continue to be used. The re-Latinization of Azeri, Kazak, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uzbek without adequate resources for adult education bred a sudden hike in illiteracy, and many a citizen remain unofficially literate in the already phased out Cyrillic-based forms of their national languages. Most language policies were laid out by the state presidents or their immediate circles, which emphasizes the highly centralistic and often authoritarian character of the new polities. With the exception of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, the use of Cyrillic isolates Russian-speakers and other minorities (that tend to stick to their Cyrillic-based scripts) vis-à-vis the titular ethnic majorities in Central Asia.
Despite the groundbreaking character of this ambitious comparative study, the main criticism is that it hardly makes use of sources in the languages it describes and analyzes. On the 32 pages of references, English-language publications prevail, with 97 Russian ones and 49 German. The last two numbers reflect the continued domination of Russian in the region and the German background of the authors. Publications in Turkish and French (45 and 17 correspondingly) reflect Ankara’s and Paris’s interest in these six new nation-states. Tellingly, the authors used only two publications in Azeri, two in Uzbek, one in Kyrgyz, one in Turkmen, and none at all in Kazakh or Tajik. These numbers mirror the near collapse of local publishing industries faced with the demise of the Soviet economy and costly script changes in the region, as well as the difficulty of obtaining such publications outside the analyzed six states. Instead, the authors provide the reader with photographic samples of script changes and language practices as observed in public spaces.
Another criticism which has to be leveled is that the authors drew almost exclusively on their own fieldwork carried out before 1999 and did not attempt to cover later developments in secondary literature, though their book appeared in 2001. Yet despite that, future students of nationalism, sociolinguistics and culture in Central Asia and the southern Caucasus will definitely refer to this highly commendable work in the coming years.