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The 1930s were a time when the Buryat language experienced drastic changes. It changed its alphabet twice and the dialect on which the standard language should be based three times. There are several papers on Buryat language policy in the 1930s, but they were all written before the fall of communism. Since no papers have appeared on this theme since then, I would like to re-examine why the Buryat language was changed so much and what happened in Buryat language policy in the 1930s. The Buryat are a Mongolic ethnic minority in Siberia. From the awakening of their national consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of Buryat intellectuals attempted to educate and modernize their people to make their nation survive. Some of these intellectuals thought that modernizing their language would be the fastest way to educate their people. They used the Mongolian alphabet for writing. By then this alphabet been used for more than 200 years, especially among the Eastern Buryats, but the spelling, vocabulary, and word usage were different from the spoken language. Some of the intellectuals introduced reforms to the Mongolian alphabet; others advocated adopting the Latin alphabet, but both of these attempts stopped when World War I broke out in 1914. After the Russian Revolution, an affirmative language policy was introduced to the indigenous peoples living in the Soviet Union. As a result Buryat intellectuals participated more actively in educating their people. Discussion on language reform again arose. Some advocated using the Cyrillic script while others advocated the Latin alphabet, but these attempts were not realized, and the use of the Mongolian alphabet continued. In the 1930s, a movement called Latinization arose in the Soviet Union. This movement started in Azerbaijan at the beginning of the 1920s and quickly spread among the Turkic people. It also caught the central government's attention. Lenin even once referred to this movement as the "Revolution from the East." In 1929, the central government adopted a resolution prohibiting the Arabic script and introduced the Latin script in its place. Other ethnic minorities, especially those whose languages never had any writing systems, followed this movement and the movement became the main part of language building. These were language policies that would provide ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union with new alphabets, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary so everyone could understand communism in their own language and enjoy autonomy in their own language. This movement reached Buryatia in 1929. Again Buryat intellectuals planned to Latinize their language. Documents preserved in the Archive of the Buryat Science Center show that, by coincidence, there were two people planning for Latinization at the same time. One was in Leningrad and the other in Buryatia. The one in Leningrad was Nicolas Poppe, a Mongolist and Professor of Leningrad University who made his Latinization plan by the order of the Central Committee for the New Turkic Alphabet. The other was Bazar Baradievich Baradin, a Buryat education activist who advocated Latinization from the beginning of the 20th century and even published a book on Buryat folklore written in the Latin alphabet in 1910. Poppe and Baradin were the two major actors of language policy in Buryatia during the Latinization period. After many debates and conferences, Poppe's plan was finally adopted as the "Latin Alphabet for Buryats" in January 1931 at a conference held in Moscow for all Mongolic peoples. The problem of the alphabet was settled, but the problem of the dialect on which the Buryat written language should be based arose. Buryat mainly consisted of three dialects, eastern, western, and southern. In the eastern and western dialects, there were many grammatical items in common, but lexically and alphabetically they were different. The east used Mongolian, while western Buryats were more familiar with Cyrillic. Eastern and southern Buryats were lexically and alphabetically the same, but grammatically different. The southern and western dialects were very different from each other. It was hoped that the written language would unite those people together into one, but it was very difficult to overcome the gap between the eastern-southern dialects and the western dialect. It was originally the Khalkha dialect that Buryat intellectuals who worked on language policy claimed first, so as to unite their written language with Mongolian. This was turned down by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party in the Buryat Oblast, since Khalkha is a Mongolian dialect, not Buryat. So the Selenge dialect, a southern dialect, was chosen since it was a Buryat dialect that was very close to the Khalkha dialect. The Selenge dialect was a peripheral dialect, only spoken by 10% of the Buryat population. From the beginning of the 20th century on, many Buryat intellectuals acted like avant-garde agents for the Mongolian world to modernize them all, some really working to help Mongolia's nation building. Thus, those intellectuals could not imagine separating from the Mongolian world. In June 1936, a conference on language was held in the capital city of Buryat ASSR, Ulan-Ude. By resolution of this conference, the dialect on which to base the standard written language was changed from the Selenge dialect to the Khori dialect, which was the eastern dialect. The Khori dialect was phonologically and grammatically very different from standard Mongolian, but was a major Buryat dialect, spoken around the capital city of Ulan-Ude. We hypothesize that this change emerged from controversies between intellectuals, those who wanted to unite their written language with Mongolian and those who wanted to make the written language based on Buryat's eastern dialects. The latter finally assumed power. As result of this change, Buryat went a different way from the Mongolian language and the rest of the Mongolian-speaking world. Poppe also made some speeches at this 1936 conference, but a letter Poppe sent one of his students, T. A. Bertagaev, a linguist, sometime in 1936, showed that he no longer played a major role in language policy. Baradin did not attend this conference since he was criticized in 1933 for his activities in the 1920s, and he quickly lost his influence. In 1935 he was sent to Leningrad where he was arrested in 1937 and executed as a victim of the Great Terror. Many Buryat intellectuals who were involved in language policy were also arrested and purged. In 1939 another change was made to the Buryat language. On the May 1, 1939, the Supreme Soviet of Buryat ASSR decided to change its alphabet from Latin to Cyrillic. From 1929 to 1939, there were many changes for the language of the Buryats. The alphabet changed from Mongolian to Latin, and then from Latin to Cyrillic. The dialect on which the written language was based changed from Khalkha to Selenge, and then from Selenge to Khori. Due to these changes, the Buryat written language was separated from the Mongolian written language and became an independent language.
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