The book addresses languages, conflict, and war in the post-Soviet states of Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, and Russia’s North Caucasus, emphasizing the pivotal role of language in forming national identity in multilingual states in the context of imperialism and warfare. Bifurcating allegiance to the national language group and minority language groups is found to be a challenging endeavor, and these efforts have served to deepen conflicts and marginalization. The study highlights how language attitudes and language policies have been used to articulate dominance and justify aggression in wars, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict being a stark case. Languages under occupation and in forced displacement are found to be subjected to pressures of assimilation and erasure. Language communities, on the other hand, react with diverse strategies of resilience and alternative paths to revitalization. Exposing war-torn settings, the authors enhance the prowess of decolonial and participatory research approaches and promoting more research on language and diasporas, language transmission, and processes of sociolinguistic migration and conflict. The book underlines the imperativeness of reflexive and ethically sound research that places voices and experiences of affected groups at the center of understanding the complex intersectionalities of language, power, resistance, and conflict.

The concept of this book emerged following February 2022 as Russia initiated its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The book discusses language conflicts in the post-Soviet world: Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, and the Russian North Caucasus. Recent horrific events have confirmed the worth of studying the entwinement of language, conflict, and war in the post-Soviet world. The aim of the volume is to study language conflict in the context of heightened tension, massive internal displacement, and migration that have a determinative effect on ethnolinguistic status all over the region. The volume reflects both the timing and the challenges of following this line of research under shifting political conditions.

This book explores language conflicts in Soviet successor states: Ukraine, the Russian North Caucasus, Georgia, and the Baltics. Current violent developments in these multiethnic countries with their shared legacies of Russian domination highlight the intertwining of language with conflict and war, reflecting confrontation and challenges to peace. It is shown how core values attached to language in identity formation and feelings of belonging or marginalization, along with attitudes to language use by the in-group in contrast to others, are easily subject to politicization. Forced migration, language erasure and shift, central in today’s post-Soviet conflicts, are also experienced by minorities in the Russian North Caucasus—such as the Circassians—based on their history of Russian colonization. The book will be of interest to readers in a wide range of fields, including sociolinguistics, language policy, and language contact, as well as identity politics, migration linguistics, state and nation building, area studies, post-Soviet and European studies, political science, international relations, and peace and conflict studies. 

The authors recount their experiences of conducting fieldwork and traveling as researchers in the Caucasus region in the final years of the Soviet Union. Today, several decades later, conflicts in the Caucasus region resulting from the Soviet dissolution process remain unresolved. This period, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, is crucial for the understanding of current developments not only in the Caucasus but in all countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.

The authors report on the political processes they witnessed in both North and South Caucasus, including the emergence of new movements for independence, the increasing tensions with Moscow, the breakdown of Soviet structures at different levels, and the growing importance of national cultures. They describe how premodern traditions still play a role, despite Soviet modernization, account for specific cultural features and similarities, and witness deepening ethnic antagonism. The Caucasus region, like the Baltic republics, was on the periphery of the Soviet Union; however, these two regions were to play an important role in the reform process and gradual disintegration of the union.

The authors are political scientist Ib Faurby, cultural geographer Lars Funch Hansen, slavicist Märta-Lisa Magnusson, historian and Iranologist Søren Theisen, and general linguist and Caucasologist Karina Vamling.

The paper presents earlier unpublished results from a field study conducted in Georgia in the late 1990s among speakers of the endangered Tsova-Tush (Bats) language (also Tsovatush, Batsbi). The aim of the study is to map patterns of language use and language choices in the family and local community in different settings and domains, to study the linguistic repertoire of speakers and how it develops. Based on written questionnaires, the study was conducted in the village of Zemo Alvani in the Akhmeta region of Georgia, where the majority of the Tsova-Tush population lives. The study spans generations of Tsova-Tush speakers from the beginning of the last century to the 1980s, showing the development from a situation with Tsova-Tush as the strongest language among the oldest generation having a firm position as the home language, to a higher fluency in Georgian in the post-war generation, followed by a clear decrease in the command of Tsova-Tush among the youngest generations.

Exploring the Linguistic Landscape of Old Batumi: The Case of Zviad Gamsakhurdia Street

— The linguistic signs in the public space reflect the language use in the surrounding neighborhood and society, forming the so-called linguistic landscape. As Landry & Bourhis (1997: 29) put it, “The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combine to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration.” The multitude of languages in the public space reflect a competition for visibility among dominant and minor languages. Georgian has gone through several phases of competition with Russian, emerging as the state language of independent Georgia. English, seeking the status of the main international language, is also competing with Russian in certain domains. Furthermore, globalization and migration are strong factors influencing language use and the linguistic landscape.

This study is a case study of one street, Zviad Gamsakhurdia Street in Old Batumi, exploring its linguistic landscape in detail: including all signs from official and commercial signs to private notes, signs, and graffiti. The study is based on fieldwork of language use in the public space conducted in July 2023, exploring which languages dominate in mono-, bi- and trilingual signs, whether there are any observable tendencies with respect to the choice of language(s) in certain domains, and what the characteristics are of official top-down communication, compared to non-official bottom-up communication. Against the increase of Russian-speaking migrants following February 2022, it is of particular interest to study which contexts signs involving Russian occur, and whether there are any observable patterns. 

The research site and data collection of this case study is limited to one street. The street has been chosen as a central street in the historical part of Old Batumi. The study of one street may not claim to be representative of the linguistic landscape of the city of Batumi as a whole. However, the study of different sites in the city contributes to an understanding of the complexity of multilingualism in the public space of the city. The central street of Luka Asatiani in Batumi has been studied with a similar approach (Vamling 2023), which allows for comparison of similarities and differences.

— References

Landry, R. & R. Bourhis (1997): ‘Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16/1, 23–49. 

Vamling, K. (2023): ‘The Linguistic Landscape of Batumi: The Case of Luka Asatiani Street'. In: Digital Kartvelology, Volume II, pp. 70–81.

Language use among Svanetians in the late 1990s. A questionnaire study in Kvemo Svaneti*

The paper presents and discusses language use among Svanetians on the basis of a questionnaire study conducted in the late 1990s in the region of Kvemo Svaneti in northern Georgia. Svanetians are bilingual in Svan and Georgian, both belonging to the Kartvelian languages. Georgian is used as the literary language, whereas the non-standardized Svan is declining in use. 

The primary aim of the study is to explore language choices among the Svanetians: Is there a preference for the use of Svan in certain domains or contexts? What is the impact of different interlocutors and settings on preferred language choices? How does the use of Svan differ among older and younger generations? 

The results of the study are based on replies to a (written) questionnaire among 48 speakers of Svan, including 44% males and 56% females, born in the years 1924 to 1988. The questionnaire relies on self-evaluation by the respondents and does not include elements of testing their proficiency.

Most respondents indicated “very good” knowledge of Svan, with a smaller proportion of the respondents, born in the 1980s, rating their proficiency in Svan as “good”.  Among the respondents, three-quarters replied that they had been raised in Svan and acquired Georgian only later, in preschool or even in school.  Svan is chosen “most often” or “always” regarding “everyday topics” and “private communication”, whereas Georgian is indicated as the most common choice in other domains, such as communication on politics and sports. 

Special attention is paid to replies by the oldest respondents in the study (born in 1925–1935). This is of particular interest, as their responses illustrate both their own language use and reflect the language use of their parents, born around the turn of the last century (replying to such questions as “What was the home language of your father and mother? Which language(s) did your mother and father use among themselves? Which language did you use when addressing your mother and father in different informal and formal domains?”). 

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*The questionnaire study was conducted in the framework of the research project The Language Situation in Georgia, with support from the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in collaboration with the Arn. Chikobava Institute of Linguistics, Georgia. In particular, the invaluable assistance with the data collection in Svanetia is acknowledged.

The paper addresses the question of when the understanding of the Caucasus region started to emerge in Europe, that is, when 'Caucasus' was used with respect to a region and not only referred to a mountain range. A closely related issue is the extent of the region that 'Caucasus' refers to, its territorial spread. My perspective is an outsider's perspective: how the region was perceived and reported on by outsiders. It is not about how the Caucasus was perceived from the inside of the region, about what makes the Caucasus a region – its historical, linguistic and cultural common roots and identity. My starting point is to take a closer look at how the concept of the Caucasus region developed. I focus on the development in Sweden, a country on the European periphery. Studies of the Caucasus were more developed and more well-known in central European countries such as Germany, France and the UK. That is also a reason why it is interesting to explore the understanding of the Caucasus in the European periphery. It's well-known that the Caucasus mountain range was a well-established geographical entity already in antiquity and the Middle Ages and it regularly appeared on early maps. This study is based on the use of the term 'Caucasus' and closely related concepts in a digital corpus of Swedish newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition, as a wider frame of reference, a corpus of old European maps of the region from the same period was compiled and is also discussed.