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Stalin and Soviet Linguistics


For no good reason today I look at an ambitious work with the name Josef Stalin on the title page,  “Marxism and the problems of linguistics” (1950). 

There was a theory among Soviet linguists at the time that all languages can be traced to a single primordial language, and that their job was to suss out what THAT proto-language must have sounded like. This was called the Japhetic theory or “linguistic paleontology.” The advocates of this theory thought they were well within Marxist traditions — developing a dialectical view of the history of language.

They also adapted their theories to the terminology of classical Marxist theory. Marx had written of the ownership and control of the means of society as the "substructure" of history and of culture as a "superstructure," suggesting something epiphenomenal.  The Japhetic theorists, accommodating their views to this, discussed language too as part of the "superstructure," that is, because the multiplicity of languages in the world could be blamed on the bourgeois.

The theory was largely the work of Nikolai Marr, a linguist who had already been dead for 16 years by the time of Stalin's pamphlet. Marr's chief book on the subject was published in 1924. It was something he had developed, then, in the period of Russia's revolution and civil war. 

Unfortunately for Marr's followers, Stalin took notice and decided the Japhetic view was nonsense. He wrote his pamphlet to say so, and to lay down the proper orthodox view of Marxists on language. 

Spoiler alert, the Japhetic view, Stalin tells us, takes an “immodest, boastful, arrogant tone alien to Marxism and tending towards a bald and off-hand negation of everything done in linguistics prior to N.Y. Marr.” 

What good things did Stalin think had happened in linguistics before Marr that Marr's views threatened? I'm not sure. At any rate, Stalin also explained that language is a tool rather like a hammer or a sickle. Thus: like physical tools, language is part of the substructure, not of the superstructure, of society. 

Stalin's intervention in the debate ended the matter. At least within the Soviet Union.  No one was going to debate with Stalin. Indeed, at one point in his pamphlet he uses the word "sabotage" in connection with the views he is opposing -- a term clearly suggesting in the political context circa 1950 that executions were on the table as a resolution of those matters.   

The lesson, such as it is, is that Stalin did in person to linguistics what he also did through the agency of Lysenko in genetics. He imposed an orthodoxy and killed original thought. Language is a tool thus is part of the substructure not the superstructure, and that is an end to the matter dammit! So ixnay on the whole imordial-pray anguage-lay issue. 

Or to switch from pig Latin to the real thing: Sic semper tyrannis. 

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