The Rise of Sociological Linguistics in the Soviet Union, 1917–1938: Institutions, Ideas and Agendas

Research questions

The project addresses the following questions:

• What was the relationship between institutional structures and theories of language developed in the Soviet Union?
• What was the relationship between the practical work conducted by linguists in accordance with Soviet language policy and the sociological theories of language they developed?
• What are the distinctive features and what is the continuing relevance of the sociology of language developed in the early Soviet Union?
• What are the intellectual sources of the ideas of Soviet sociologists of language?
• How are pre-Revolutionary Russian philology and the sociology of language of the early Soviet period related?
• How is the development of a sociological approach to language related to such contiguous areas as psychology (e.g. Vygotskii, Luria), folkloristics (e.g. Sokolov, Freidenberg, Frank-Kamenetskii, Zhirmunskii), literary studies (e.g. Zhirmunskii, the Bakhtin Circle, Russian Formalism)?