The quest for a unified alphabet: a Soviet revolutionary project
Journal: SERVAL (Université de Lausanne)
Year: 2019

The unification of alphabets should be considered as the most exciting initiative of the whole language building [jazykovoe stroitel’stvo] in the Soviet Union in the early 1930’s. My paper aims at exploring the scopes and the results of this project, as well as its internal logics. I will try to examine how linguistic politics could be explained in the frame of phonological theory, which anticipated Troubetzkoy’s reflections by about fifteen years. Then I will show how concretely the unified alp