Speaking in Soviet tongues

"The earliest years of Bolshevik rule produced a communication gap that held little promise for the makings of a proletarian dictatorship. This gap drew the attention of language authorities - most notably Maxim Gorky - and gave rise to a society-wide debate over the appropriate voice of the new Soviet state and its citizenry." "Speaking in Soviet Tongues offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of this critical debate, demonstrating how language ideologies and practices were invented, contested, and redefined to help legitimate broader - and often competing - notions of authority and identity. Using a wide range of archival and other original sources from disciplines central in the formation and dissemination of language "standards" - linguistics, education, journalism, and imaginative literature - Speaking in Soviet Tongues shows how early Soviet language culture gave rise to unparalleled verbal creativity and utopian imagination while sowing the seeds for perhaps the most notorious forms of Orwellian "newspeak" known to the modern era."--BOOK JACKET.