Politics of Language in the Ex-Soviet Muslim States: Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan by Jacob M. Landau, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele

593 Ab Imperio, 3/2005 Tomasz KAMUSELLA Jacob M. Landau and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, Politics of Language in the Ex-Soviet Muslim States: Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan , and Tajikistan (London: Hurst and Company, 2001), xiv+260 pp. Index, References, Tables, and Photographs. ISBN: 1-85065-442-5 (hardback edition). The recent marriage of the study of nationalism and ethnicity with sociolinguistics resulted in a steady outflow of insightful works that probe the political uses of language in various regions of the world. This novel field originated with Joshua A. Fishman’s seminal Language and Nationalism (1972),1 duly quoted in the reviewed book. Two years later, Fishman founded the renowned International Journal of the Sociology of Language that definitively tore down disciplinary barriers between linguistics, sociology , anthropology, and political science . During the 1980s, and especially after the fall of communism, numerous case studies on language and politics followed.2 Jacob Landau and Barbara Kellner -Heinkele’s study zooms in on the distant (from the Western vantage) landlocked region of the Eurasian landmass. The authors of this collection have produced an insightful academic work that explores the uses of language and script for the processes of nationand nation-state-building. This crucial political-cum-linguistic aspect of statehood and nationhood legitimization is often left out from other publications on this region and only the book under review has been solely devoted to this issue . This makes it required reading for political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars who wish to understand what has happened in post-Soviet Central Asia and Azerbaijan in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union. After the general presentation of the 20th -century social, economic, 1 Joshua A. Fishman. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays. Rowley, 1972. 2 See, for instance, R. Picchio and H. Goldblatt (Eds.). Aspects of the Slavic Language Question. Bloomington, 1984; J. Edwards. Language, Society, and Identity. Oxford, 1985; L. H. Liu. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity – China, 1900-1937. Berkeley, 1995; L.-J. Calvet. Language Wars and Linguistic Politics. Oxford, 1998; Michael G. Smith. Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917-1953. Berlin, 1998; Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui. Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience. Chicago, 1998; R. Greenberg . Language and Identity in the Balkans. Cambridge, 2004; Y. Suleiman. A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East. Cambridge, 2004. 594 Рецензии/Reviews and demographic realities in the six newly emerged nation-states (Chapter 2), the authors devote the entire Chapter 3 to the Russian (Russianspeaking ) diaspora in Central Asia. At the beginning of the 1990s, Russians and other Slavs accounted for half of Kazakhstan’s population, but never were they more than 60,000 to 80,000 in six-million-strong Tajikistan. On the one hand, this diaspora provides justification for Russia’s continued military presence in Central Asia; on the other hand, thepresenceoftheRussophone population coaxed the shift of the Kazakhstani capital from Almaty to northern Astana in order to speed up ethnic Kazakhization of northern Kazakhstan. In 2004, a similar political end was met by concentrated administrative pressure exerted on Turkmenistan’s ethnically non-Turkmen Russian-speakers either to leave for Russia or get Turkmenized. In fact, Turkmenistan’s official policy of neutrality is nothing more than a deft cover-up for the authoritarian manner of nation-state-building carried out by Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbasha (Father of Turkmens), who recently replaced the Bible and the Koran with his new Holy Writ of Ruhnama. It is noteworthy that despite the official rhetoric of Turkmenization, he wrote in Russian this compulsory reading for civil servants and students. The political and historical detours inescapable, Chapter 3 offers a brief overview of Soviet language and culture policies that in the 1920s and 1930s created six new nations (or, nationalities, as they were termed in the Soviet nomenclature) out of a population that identified itself primarily with Islam and their localities or nomadic clans rather than with any extant states. “Nation ” was a novel idea that did not catch on yet even in 1991, when the Alma Ata (Almaty) conference of the first secretaries of the...