Russification
- This article is about the political term. For localization of computers and software, see Russification (computers).
Russification refers to both official and unofficial policy of Imperial Russia and Soviet Union with respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in Russia proper aimed at the Russian domination. In a narrow sense, Russification is used to denote influence of the Russian language on other Slavic languages.
The two main areas of Russification are politics and culture. Some consider shifts in demographics in favour of Russian population to be a form of Russification as well. In politics, an element of Russification is assigning Russian nationals to leading administrative positions in national institutions. In culture, Russification primarily amounts to domination of the Russian language in official business and strong influence of Russian language on the national ones.
One of the examples of Russification was replacement of the Polish language by Russian in areas of Poland-Lithuania after Partitions of Poland. In particular, after the January Uprising of 1863, in 1864 Polish was banned in public places; in the 1880s Polish was banned in schools and offices of Congress Kingdom. A similar development was in Lithuania: its Governor General Mikhail Muravyov instituted a complete ban on Latin alphabet and Lithuanian printed matter. The ban was lifted only in 1904. Still another example is Ems Ukaz of 1876, banning the Ukrainian language.
As a result of this policy, quite a few national languages, such as Tatar and Belarusian, were perceived by a significant part of population as "rural" or "uneducated" ones, not to say as "useless" for study at school.
After the 1917 revolution, the intellectuals of several Central Asian countries established new standards for the local language, often they substituted the Arabic alphabet by adapted versions of the Latin alphabet, usually inspired by the Turkish alphabet.
During the rule of Stalin, these alphabets were changed for versions of the Cyrillic alphabet.
This also happened when Moldova was taken from Romania after the Second World War.
The Moldovan language restored the Cyrillic alphabet abandoned by Romanians in the 19th century.
Several of these countries have changed to Latin
In the Soviet Union, publications in technical and scientific journals with rare exceptions were in Russian. This had led to underdevelopment of modern technical and scientific terminology in national languages, further degrading the status of a national language. While in almost all Soviet republics bilingualism was official, it was "asymmetric": the History of Russia
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