SUMMARY:

The article treats a linguistic norm both as an instrument of power and as a common good: a collectively maintained infrastructure of intelligibility. Drawing on the Ab Imperio forum “The Prospect of Studying World Russian Languages, Literatures, and Histories,” the case of Kazakhstani Russian, place-name conflicts, changing dictionary labels, and Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, it distinguishes usage, norm, codification, local variation, and register-specific error. Linguistic democracy is defined through community participation, speakers’ access to prestigious registers, and transparent decisions. Norms provide horizontal compatibility among territorial varieties and vertical continuity across generations. The proposed model of distributed codification combines an interregional layer, local norms, temporal and register labels, corpus evidence, and preservation of the linguistic archive.