Languages of the Soviet Union

Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian was the official language for the Russian Empire, with the exception of a few permitted languages in autonomous regions as Poland, Finland, and the Baltic provinces. Regional languages were discouraged or forbidden, as was the case of Ukrainian between 1876 and 1905. There was no explicit plan to enable non-Russians to learn Russian, and there was no possibility for other ethnic groups to develop their own culture and language.  

In this period, some individual efforts developed written forms for some of these languages, but they had limited effect and they were focused on missionary activities. In the case of languages with written tradition, as Armenian, Georgian, Turkic languages of Central Asia, and Tadzhik, their writing system continued being used, but mainly in connection with religious education.

Equality of all peoples and of all languages was a commitment for Vladimir Lenin and his associates before and after the October Revolution.[1] In 1914, Lenin stood a stand against a compulsory or official state language.[2] Therefore, the Soviet Union didn't declare a compulsory or official state language and guarantee the existence of the spoken languages of national minorities. Everybody had the right of using his own language, both in private and public, even in correspondence with officials and giving testimony in courts.[1] The USSR was a multilingual state, with around 130 languages spoken natively.[1] Discrimination on the basis of language was illegal under the Soviet Constitution, though status of its languages differed.

However, the Soviet Union faced the problem of unifying the country, and for that reason, Russian was selected as the common language to facilitate communication between members of different ethnic groups.[1]

Few of the languages of the Soviet state had written forms. One of the first priorities of the Soviet state was the creation of writing systems and the development of literacy programs. New or modified writing systems were adopted for over half of the languages spoken in the territory during the early Post-revolutionary years.[1] In some particular cases, preparatory work was required before the creation of an orthography due to the lack of previous linguistic analysis, as in the case of languages of the Far North.

When a language had already a writing system, there were attempts for making it easier to learn and accessible. As part of this policy, in 1918 Russian orthography was simplified removing orthographic distinctions without phonetic counterpart.[3] Phonemic or close to phonemic orthographies weren't modified, such as Armenian, Georgian, or Chuvash.[1]

Writing systems based on the Arabic script caused major problems because they were poorly adapted to indicate phonemic differences that are found in Turkic languages or North-East Caucasian languages. A first attempt tried to create a simplified form of Arabic script. However, the task was abandoned. Instead, the Latin alphabet was used for all languages of the Soviet Union without a traditional alphabetical writing system, avoiding the impression that the policy was a Russification attempt.[1]

Written forms were developed for several languages with a very small number of speakers, such as the Finno-Ugric languages Karelian, Veps, and Lapp. However, many of these writing systems had a short life. In the case of Itelmen, never was put into practical use. Other languages that received their writing systems during the 1920s and early 1930s kept using them, such as Nanay, Nivkh, Koryak, Chuckchi, Khanty, and Mansi.[1]