Abstract

The dissolution of the USSR has created conditions for a unique sociolinguistic experiment, in which fourteen countries, previously united by the same language and political system, engaged in a nation-building process, creating new linguistic regimes. Two decades later, how did these countries fare in their struggle to initiate a shift from Russian to the titular languages? Which ones succeeded and which ones restored Russian as an official language? How did they go about articulating the rights of linguistic minorities? Did Russian give way to the new lingua franca, English? This collection offers answers to these and many other questions through detailed analyses of language and education policies and practices in post-Soviet countries.

Dr. Aneta Pavlenko is an Associate Professor at the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. She has lectured widely in Europe, North America, and Japan, and published numerous scientific articles and book chapters on sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition. She is an author of Emotions and Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), co-author of Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition (with Scott Jarvis; Routledge, 2008), editor of Bilingual Minds (Multilingual Matters, 2006) and co-editor of Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2004).