FROM THE LANGUAGE OF A NATION TO THE LANGUAGE OF A CIVILIZATION: THE FORMATION OF RUSSIA’S STATE LANGUAGE POLICY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2218-1067-2025-3-122-132Keywords:
language policy, nationalities policy, cultural policy, policy formation, state-nation, state-civilizationAbstract
Recently, it has become possible to observe the development of new official documents not only on nationalities policy, but also on language policy. This process witnesses that language policy is being formed as an independent direction of state policy. What are the reasons and possible consequences of this process? This article analyzes the official discourse on language policy issues presented in strategic documents and legislative acts adopted and developed in recent years, as well as the institutional context. The aim is to understand the role of ideas and the limitations imposed by structural factors on the formation of language policy within the neoinstitutionalist approach. The results of the study show that the ideological desire to change the content of language policy is associated with the processes of nation-building and a broader search for civilizational identity, in which, primarily due to the foreign policy agenda, language has acquired the role of a key marker. However, an attempt to change the form of language policy encounters significant structural limitations and may lead to unexpected outcomes for domestic policy. In particular, as a result of replacing the collocation of the concepts "language" and "people" with the collocation of "language" and "culture".References
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