Multilingualism in Post‐Soviet Successor States

After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the fourteen successor states began to distance themselves from Russia and its language. This situation was strikingly different from most post‐colonial states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that maintained the languages of the former colonizers. For researchers, the post‐Soviet context became a natural sociolinguistic ‘experiment’, in which the previously shared political and linguistic system offered a common starting point for language reforms and the different outcomes illuminated the effects of demographic, political, economic, and social factors. The purpose of the present article is to outline the key findings of the research to date, to discuss their implications for sociolinguistic theory, and to identify gaps and productive directions for future inquiry.