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This chapter presents the major topics and central research questions of the book. It introduces the concept of ‘sociolinguistic change’ and discusses the ways in which contemporary literature can be read as a response to the language situation in post-Soviet Russia. It also outlines the major linguistic issues subject to contestation and debate in post-perestroika Russia and presents a chapter overview of the book.

This chapter offers readings of two recent Russian novels, Valerii Votrin’s Logoped (The Speech Therapist, 2012) and Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Zakhvat Moskovii: natsional-lingvisticheskii roman (The Occupation of Muscovy: a national-linguistic novel, 2012). Votrin represents a linguistic dystopia governed by strict orthoepic norms. The story is told through the portrayal of two persons, a speech therapist representing the authorities, and a journalist, expelled for his oppositional views. Gigolashvili’s novel tells about a young German student of Russian and his encounter with the grammar nazi movement, a group of self-appointed language mavens who monitor, expose and ridicule linguistic liberties and orthographic errors in highly aggressive ways. Both novels can be read as responses to language legislation and language cultivation, highly topical issues in present-day Russian language culture.

This chapter analyses explicit responses to the ‘language question’ in post-Soviet Russia by writers participating in surveys, interviews, roundtable discussions or conferences dedicated to the language situation. Such statements on the language situation illustrate the linguistic attitudes of individual writers towards some of the central topics in the language debates, while conveying the writers’ own assessments of their status as opinion-makers in this area.

The book’s conclusion discusses the findings of Parts three and four and their implications for a general theory of what this book proposes to call performative metalanguage. Arguing that literary works may contain a metalinguistic dimension and intention, we maintain that a theory of performative metalanguage helps us understand this particular form of linguistic commentary, mapping out ways in which we can identify and assess such reflection.

The chapter provides a genealogy of the 2016 CILE (Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española), during which the Spanish officialdom celebrated Puerto Rico's linguistic ties to Spain as a 21st-century mercantile ploy. I review the language debates that raged in Puerto Rico in the 1940s, examining Pedro Salinas' 1944 Commencement Speech at the University of Puerto Rico, which would become his famed "Defensa del lenguaje"; revisiting Gov. Luis Muñoz Marín's 1953 speech "La personalidad puertorriqueña en el Estado Libre Asociado"; and ending with a brief coda on Ana Lydia Vega's 1981 short story "Pollito Chicken," to reflect on the positions shared by both Spanish exiles to the Caribbean and local intellectuals regarding language as a self-evident vessel of identity. The main argument is that a rhetoric of defense, crystallized in the 1940s, was redeployed by successive and presumptively opposite segments of the intelligentsia.

This chapter explores the reactions of people working in the cultural field to the 2014 Russian ban on the use of verbal obscenity in film, literature and public performances, reactions that have not only taken the form of commentaries and statements in interviews or the social media, but have also provoked protest actions featuring linguistic and artistic practices (readings, performances), thus responding and commenting in ways bordering on the implicit and performative.

This chapter explores how Russian prose writers create fictional representations of a past, or a future, where language emerges as an essential theme. It offers close readings of two works, one portraying a fictional future for Russian – Tat’iana Tolstaia’s 2000 novel Kys’ (The Slynx), and one diving into the language’s past – Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Lavr (Laurus, 2012). The analysis shows how both authors challenge the standard language by stretching its potential and including a wealth of elements taken from non-standard varieties and older forms. Whereas Tolstaia’s novel depicts a brutal, destructive world of linguistic dystopia with, or so it would seem, no real past and no future, Vodolazkin’s text presents a smoothly created linguistic amalgam characterised by flexibility and multifunctionality. The chapter discusses the linguistic attitudes implied in the two approaches and their relevance to the post-Soviet language debates.