|
A Revolution of Languages, One Hundred Years On
One hundred years ago, Europe was the site of a revolution of languages without precedent in scale and speed in modern history. In a matter of mere months in 1917-18, a host of languages side-lined and often suppressed in the Russian Empire – Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Crimean Tatar, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian – suddenly became vehicles for the formal declaration of sovereignty over swathes of territory.
