The languages of the Soviet Union are hundreds of different languages and dialects from several different language groups. In 1922, it was decreed that all nationalities in the Soviet Union had the right to education in their own language. The new orthography used the Cyrillic, Latin, or Arabic alphabet, depending on geography and culture. After 1937, all languages that had received new alphabets after 1917 began using the Cyrillic alphabet. This way, it would be easier for linguistic minorities to learn to write both Russian and their native language. In 1960, the school educational laws were changed and teaching became more dominated by Russian. Moreover, the Armenian and Georgian, as well as the BalticSoviet Socialist Republics were the only Soviet republics to maintain their writing systems. In 1975, Brezhnev said "under developed socialism, when the economies in our country have melted together in a coherent economic complex; when there is a new historical concept—the Soviet people—it is an objective growth in the Russian language's role as the language of international communications when one builds Communism, in the education of the new man! Together with one's own mother tongue one will speak fluent Russian, which the Soviet people have voluntarily accepted as a common historical heritage and contributes to a further stabilization of the political, economic and spiritual unity of the Soviet people."
Distribution and status
dominated in the European part of the Soviet Union, the Baltic languagesLithuanian and Latvian, and the Finnic languageEstonian were used next to Russian in the Baltic region, while Moldovan was used in the southwest region. In the Caucasus alongside Russian there were Armenian, Azeri and Georgian. In the Russian far north, there were several minority groups who spoke different Uralic languages; most of the languages in Central Asia were Turkic with the exception of Tajik, which is an Iranian language. The USSR was a multilingual state, with over 123 languages spoken natively. Discrimination on the basis of language was illegal under the Soviet Constitution, though status of its languages differed. Although the USSR did not have de jure an official language over most of its history, until 1990, and Russian was merely defined as the language of interethnic communication, it assumed de facto the role of official language. For its role and influence in the USSR, see Russification. On a second level were the languages of the other 14 Union Republics. In line with their de jure status in a federal state, they had a small formal role at the Union level and as the main language of its republic. Their effective weight, however, varied with the republic, or even inside it. Of these fourteen languages, two are often considered varieties of other languages: Tajik of Persian, and Moldovan of Romanian. Strongly promoted use of Cyrillic in many republics however, combined with lack of contact, led to the separate development of the literary languages. Some of the former Soviet republics, now independent states, continue to use the Cyrillic alphabet at present, while others have opted to use the Latin alphabet instead. The Autonomous republics of the Soviet Union and other subdivision of the USSR lacked even this de jure autonomy, and their languages had virtually no presence at the national level. They were, however, present in education. Some smaller languages with very dwindling small communities, like Livonian, were neglected, and weren't present either in education or in publishing. Several languages of non-titular nations, like German, Korean or Polish, although having sizable communities in the USSR, and in some cases being present in education and in publishing, were not considered to be Soviet languages. On the other hand, Finnish, although not generally considered a language of the USSR, was an official language of the Karelia and its predecessor as a Soviet republic. Also Yiddish and Romany were considered Soviet languages.
