Language on Display

Post-Soviet Russia was a period of linguistic liberalisation, instability and change with varied attempts to regulate and legislate language usage, a time when the language question permeated all spheres of social, cultural and political life.

Key topics for debate included the Soviet linguistic legacy, the past and future of Russian, linguistic variation, language policy and linguistic ideologies. This book looks at how these debates featured in literature and illustrates the discussion through six interpretive readings of post-Soviet Russian prose. It analyses both the writers? explicit and implicit responses and in doing opens up new perspectives for sociolinguistic research on metalanguage.

Spanning a number of theoretical fields including language variation, language policy and literary stylistics, Ingunn Lunde provides a coherent way of triangulating these fields by the introduction of the concept of performative metalanguage. The book also offers insight into the role of writers in the broader social and political context of language culture in contemporary Russia and into the various ways in which the linguistic and aesthetic practices of literary art can engage in questions related to the negotiation of linguistic norms.

Lunde?s study deserves a wider audience than Slavists alone. Her groundbreaking interdisciplinary methodology, as well as the compelling argument about performative metalanguage, could inspire new (comparative) perspectives on other cultural and linguistic contexts.