Abstract
THE IMPLEMENTATION THE USSR STATE NATIONALITIES PRINCIPLE ON THE CRIMEAN TATARS AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE CRIMEAN TATAR LANGUAGE
USSR, as a result of the governments' implementation of expansionism policy starting from the foundation years, after Second World War, became the largest and multi-national state in the world in terms of the extent of its territory. For the continuity of multinational states, the concept and system of the principle of nationalities was seen as inevitable by some thinkers and administrators. Adopting this idea as a principle, the USSR implemented the principle of nationalities to other communities under its administration. The real purpose of this principle, developed by V. I. Lenin within the framework of the ideology of socialism, is to suppress and then assimilate minority nationalities and communities.
Crimea has a special place in the implementation of the principle of nationalities in the USSR. The Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of this region, which has great strategic importance and value, saw the harshest face of the USSR nationalities principle implimentation. In consequence of those implimentation, which continued effectively for 70 years, the national and basic cultural elements of the Crimean Tatars suffered a great loss. In this study, the legal regulations of the USSR nationalities principle for the Crimean Tatars and its implimentation in the field of education were discussed, and the negative effects of these implimentation, especially on the language, were investigated.
Keywords
Crimean Tatars, Crimean Tatar Language, Nationalities Principle, language changing, bilingualism.