Arai Yukiyasu
Hokkaido University, Japan
Abstract
The article is devoted to the issues of language policy of the Mongolian peoples of the USSR and Mongolia, namely the Buryats, Kalmyks and Mongols from the 1920s to the 1940s, which is the most turbulent and fateful period in the history of written languages of these peoples. There are no comparative studies on language policy of all these Mongolian peoples in that period, so the paper is intended to fill in this gap. The author traces the history of the written languages of Buryats, Kalmyks and Mongols from the moment of their origin to 1941 in a broad historical context. The processes of Romanization, Cyrillization, the activities of famous linguists and public figures of that time are discussed in detail. Separately, the author dwells on the conference of the Mongolian group of peoples on the issues of writing and language in 1931, which he considers as an unfulfilled chance for the unity of the Mongolian peoples on the basis of writing. It is concluded that the division of the Mongolian languages into Khalkha-Mongolian, Buryat and Kalmyk was actually the result of the language policy of that period. The visualization of speech through alphabets and spelling has defined the boundaries between these languages.
Keywords: Buryats, Kalmyks, Mongols, language policy, Mongolian writing, alphabet, spelling, Todo bichig, Cyrillic, Latin
For citation: Yukiyasu Arai. Integration and division of the “language”: language policy of the Mongolian peoples in the USSR and Mongolia in 1920–1940. Sociolinguistics, 2021, no.1(5) [online], pp. 9–30. (In Russ.) DOI: 10.37892/2713-2951-2021-1-5-9-30