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Article ID: CBB928292353

Russian and the Making of World Languages during the Cold War (2017)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 108
Issue: 3
Pages: 643-650

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/694163

DOI: 10.1086/694163

Publication Date: 2017
Edition Details: This article is part of the Focus Section: Linguistic Hegemony and the History of Science
Language: English

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Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence Cross-national interaction Cold War Linguistics; philology Linguistics Language and languages Russia

This essay uses the case of Russian, in its relation to other languages, to look at the ways in which the architects of internationalism in the aftermath of World War II established a new hegemony of world languages, responding to the challenge posed by the rise of Russian as a scientific and political language. What was initially a campaign by the Soviet delegation at UNESCO for one cause—recognition of the status of the Russian language within the organization—was turned by other delegations into a campaign for a different cause—multilingualism. Rather than establishing Russian on a par with English and French, the Soviet intervention helped to create a new triumvirate of world languages—Russian, Spanish, and Arabic—as these were recognized by international organizations such as the United Nations and UNESCO. The case of the rise of Russian as a language of science and politics helps to underscore the complexities and the ambiguities involved in the negotiation of the language regime, in which political arguments were translated into technological choices, the diplomats’ problems were cast as a problem of communication, and the language in which political arguments were made oftentimes mattered as much as the arguments themselves.

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Article Michael D. Gordin (2017) Introduction: Hegemonic Languages and Science. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 606-611). unapi

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