The Russian dialectologist Dmitrii Vladimirovich Bubrikh had been a fierce critic of the language policies in the Karelian ASSR already since 1932.Bubrikh, 1932. He was given a leading role in the development of a new Karelian orthography, and on 23 December 1937, just before the new Soviet language policy was set in motion, his first draft for a Karelian grammar was made public. Bubrikh’s orthography was based on the northern Karelian Proper dialect and it was quickly determined that the proposal was too close to the Standard Finnish it was meant to replace. A new draft was prepared and formally accepted in 1938, this time closer to the southern dialects.Austin, 1992, pp. 23–24.
The rushed work, it was later revealed in archival documents, proved largely unusuable to Karelians, who could not understand their own literary language.Afanas’eva, 2014. Nevertheless, the new orthography was strongly promoted through literature, newspapers, educational and lingustic material, and Communist Party propaganda.Austin, 1992.
Afanas’eva, E.A. (2014). Создание и распространение контента: этические регуляторы в цифровом медиапространстве [Creation and Distribution of Content: Ethical Regulators in the Digital Media Space]. In Zhurnalistskij ezhegodnik, pp. 89–91.
Austin, P.M. (1992). Soviet Karelian: The Language That Failed. In Slavic Review, pp. 16–35. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 20 September 2026 from jstor.org
Bubrikh, D.V. (1932). Karely i karel’skii iazyk [Karelians and the Karelian language]. Izdatel’stvo Mosoblispolkoma.
Bubrikh, D.V. (1937). Grammatika karel’skogo iazyka: fonetika, morfologiia [Grammar of the Karelian language: phonetics, morphology]. Izdanie Karel’skogo Nauchno-Issledovatel’skogo Intituta Kul’tury.
Bubrikh, D.V. (1938). Основные правила правописания единого карельского литературного языка на новом алфавите [Basic rules of spelling of the unified Karelian literary language in the new alphabet]. Karelian State Publishing House. Retrieved 20 September 2026 from rusneb.ru