Language policy
After the Tito-Stalin rift in 1948, the relations between Stalinist Albania and Yugoslavia were also broken. Language policy was of utmost importance in communist Yugoslavia, which after World War II was reorganised as a federation of ethnolinguistically defined nations, in emulation of the interwar Soviet nationalities policy. For instance, in 1944, the Macedonian language was proclaimed for the sake of distancing former Vardar Banovina, which was incorporated into wartime Bulgaria, from Bulgarian language and culture. Likewise, in postwar Kosovo, the local Albanian language was distanced from Albania's standard steeped in Tosk, by basing it on the Kosovar dialect of Gheg. As a result, a standard Kosovar language was formed. However, after the rapprochement between Albania and Yugoslavia at the turn of the 1970s, Belgrade adopted Albania's Tosk-based standard of the Albanian language, which ended the brief flourishing of the Gheg-based Kosovar language.