Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-j7cmm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-10T18:14:11.469Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Soviet Karelian: The Language That Failed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Paul M. Austin*
Affiliation:
The Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, McGill University

Extract

On January 1, 1938 virtually every trace of anything Finnish, including the language, disappeared in the Karelian ASSR, where until the day before Finnish had been one of the two official languages (with Russian) and the language of instruction in schools and of a wide variety of published materials—newspapers, literary journals and almanacs, J educational texts, translated belles lettres (both Russian and foreign) and official documents.

The history of Finnish in the Karelian ASSR dates from the Peace of Tartu (1920) which established the Finnish-Soviet border. It also stipulated that the "language of administration, legislation and public education" in the newly formed Karelian Workers Commune should be the "local popular language and designated Finnish that language. This might seem strange, since in 1923 there were in Soviet Kareliaonly 1,051 Finns, half of whom lived in the capital, Petrozavodsk.

Information

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable