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On January 1, 1938 virtually every trace of anything Finnish, including the language, disappeared in the Karelian ASSR, where until the day before Finnish had been one of the two official languages (with Russian) and the language of instruction in schools and of a wide variety of published materials—newspapers, literary journals and almanacs, J educational texts, translated belles lettres (both Russian and foreign) and official documents.The history of Finnish in the Karelian ASSR dates from the Peace of Tartu (1920) which established the Finnish-Soviet border. It also stipulated that the "language of administration, legislation and public education" in the newly formed Karelian Workers Commune should be the "local popular language and designated Finnish that language. This might seem strange, since in 1923 there were in Soviet Karelia only 1,051 Finns, half of whom lived in the capital, Petrozavodsk.

The Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic provides a unique opportunity for an examination of Soviet linguistic policy. Part of the difficulty in the analysis of the development of Soviet languages has been the lack of a control language or suitable basis for comparison between a language in its Soviet and non-Soviet environment. While it is impossible to determine how a language would have developed had there been no revolution or had it not been in the Soviet Union, some very general observations seem clear. The example of Turkish and Azerbaijani is instructive in this respect. The entire orientation of these two languages has changed drastically since their respective revolutions, particularly in the replacement of the Arabic alphabet by Latin and Cyrillic respectively, the handling of traditional arabisms and Persianisms, and the sources for neologisms (Western European languages and native roots for Turkish and Russian for Azerbaijani). There are, however, very few situations where a realistic comparison can be made between different versions of the same language, for the language abroad may represent only an emigre community or may exist in totally different circumstances, such as Iranian Azerbaijani, or the Soviet language may itself represent only a rump, such as Soviet Yiddish.

Fears have often been expressed outside the Soviet Union that the influx of Russian words into the non-Russian languages is part of an attempt to russianize them with a view to make them ultimately superfluous. These fears now seem to be greatly exaggerated, as there is little evidence to show that these languages are losing their vitality or are doomed to extinction. While the total lexicon of any given language, in this case Uzbek, the third language numerically (after Russian and Ukrainian) and the largest non-Slavic language, may have a significant number of Russian loanwords, it does not necessarily follow that all these words are in fact an essential segment of the language. The life and viability of a language depend not upon the percentage of so-called foreign words in its vocabulary, but upon its daily use in ordinary situations and in creative writing. The major problem in this area has been the apparently large number of Russian borrowings seen in the non-Russian languages, especially those in non-Slavic ones using Cyrillic. Words are often taken in their Russian orthographic shape without regard for the internal rules of the various languages. Even a cursory glance at any newspaper is enough to show the casual observer that these languages have been russianized to a certain extent. Soviet sources have always emphasized that there has been a "sovietization" of non-Russian languages, while admitting that Russian is the main source for new vocabulary. However it is pointed out that most of these borrowings are "international" words taken into the several languages via Russian. Counter arguments have emphasized that the "common-spelling" principle, by which all words from Russian, be they "international" or not, are borrowed in their exact Russian spelling, proves that russianization, not sovietization, is taking place.