SUMMARY:

This study investigates the rise of “linguistic sovereignty” in Eastern Europe, examining how states transform languages from communication tools into rights-bearing, legal, and ideological entities that require institutional protection. Through detailed analysis of Ukraine’s institutional innovation – the state language commissioner established in 2019 – the research illustrates how post-transition states address institutional weaknesses by deploying intensive identity-management mechanisms that subordinate individual communicative rights to collective symbolic protection. The study reveals that transnational cultural phenomena, such as Russophonia, undergo systematic reconceptualization from flexible communicative practices into securitized categories governed by bureaucracy and law. Drawing on Marco Puleri’s conceptualization of Russophonia as a “performative linguistic practice” characterized by polycentricity and non-identitarian flexibility, the analysis demonstrates how post-transit governance transforms these fluid practices into rigidly monitored markers of loyalty and compliance. This shift reflects broader changes in Eastern Europe’s post-transit political ontology, where symbolic entities – such as state languages, narratives of historical justice, collective memory, and markers of cultural authenticity – increasingly replace the traditional liberal focus on individual rights and minority protections. The analysis employs fetishization theory to understand how languages acquire quasi-personhood within legal systems, with the state language commissioner functioning not to protect speakers’ rights but to defend the language itself as a juridical person. Examining the office’s evolution through three successive commissioners (2019–2025), the study documents enforcement patterns, legal architecture, and constitutional tensions that reveal the institutionalization of “symbolic emergency governance.” The findings suggest that these institutional innovations represent not temporary crisis responses but permanent features of emerging governance structures that transcend traditional categories of authoritarianism and democracy. Understanding these developments requires sustained attention to contemporary ideological production – the creative political and cultural processes through which societies reimagine fundamental relationships between individual autonomy, collective identity, and state authority under conditions of geopolitical competition and military conflict.