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  • The languages of the former Soviet republics: Their history and development by Gary C. Fouse
  • Gary H. Toops
The languages of the former Soviet republics: Their history and development. By Gary C. Fouse. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000. Pp. vii, 457. $57.50.

This monograph provides a compendium of the sociohistorical background and the current legal and practical status of the eponymous (titular) languages of each of the fourteen former non-Russian Soviet republics. In addition, it includes similar chapter length compendia regarding the languages of the Crimean and Volga Tatars and the Soviet Jews (Yiddish).

Fouse states at the outset that ‘[t]his book is not linguistically oriented’ (9). Indeed, F’s assessment is borne out throughout the book by statements such as these: ‘If one were to examine the history of a particular language, he or she would often find that the standard variety was in fact once a dialect like the other dialects in that country’ (16), and ‘Like Russian, Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet with 33 characters (There are differences as to a couple of characters)’ (22). Some familiarity with the concepts of supradialectal norm and script might well have aided F in formulating his linguistic descriptions here with somewhat greater accuracy. As things stand, F’s tortuous descriptions of various language-related [End Page 199] phenomena are likely to prove dissatisfying to linguists and nonlinguists alike.

F appears to have culled most of the factual data about the seventeen languages he discusses from current sociopolitical books and articles as well as a few linguistics publications. These data are intertwined with a number of narratives collected mostly from former Soviet citizens residing in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. The narratives take the form of personal testimonies and provide anecdotal evidence of the linguistic situation ‘on the ground’ in the former Soviet republics, in both the Soviet and the post-Soviet period. From all the testimonies a similar picture emerges: Russian, as the official medium of interethnic communication in the Soviet Union, predominated over all the titular languages of the non-Russian republics. As a result, Russians residing in non-Russian republics generally declined to learn the local language while the eponymous populations felt compelled to learn Russian as a sine qua non of social advancement, albeit often to the neglect of their own native language.

In a pinch one might consult this book as a quick reference work, although readers would be better advised to consult F’s sources directly, for it is not always clear that F has fully understood them. About Moldovan, for example, we are told that ‘the Soviets simply instituted the Cyrillic alphabet... and called the language “Moldavian”, the Russian word for Moldovan’ (3); about ‘the three Slavic languages of the former Soviet Union’ we are told that ‘Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusan... form the East Slavonic Branch’ (5); and about Belarus F would have us believe that ‘the name [sic] signifies “a sovereign and free Belarus” ’ (65; emphases added).

It is probably safe to conclude that in spite (or perhaps because) of its promising title, The languages of the former Soviet republics: Their history and development ultimately proved to be too ambitious an undertaking for its doubtless well-meaning author.

Gary H. Toops
Wichita State University
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