prof. Leonid Kulikov (Gent-Louvain-la-Neuve)
This talk will focus on a half-forgotten episode from the history of Soviet linguistics. In 1950, at the end of the discussion about Marxism in linguistics, Stalin made the puzzling claim that the Russian national language is based on the so-called ‘Kursko-Orlovskij’ dialect. Outlining the historical context of these years (the end of the dominance of Marr’s New Theory of Language, or “Japhetidology”), the lecture will try to uncover possible origins of this statement.