Institute of the Peoples of the North

The Institute of the Peoples of the North (Russian: Институт Народов Севера) is a research and later educationary institute based in Saint Petersburg. Its objective is to examine topics related to the northern minorities in the Soviet Union, and to prepare teachers for the northern boarding schools. One of the central figures involved in the research institute was Vladimir Bogoraz.

The institute was founded in 1930, as four years previously it had become possible to study the languages of the northern peoples in their own right at the Institute for Eastern Studies at Leningrad State University. By the end of 1929, the institute's teachers had joined forces to create the Unified Northern Alphabet (Russian: Единый северный алфавит) for use by the linguistic minorities living in the north of the Soviet Union. The alphabet consisted of 32 Latin-based letters, some of which were equipped with diacritics. For practical reasons, i.e., typographical reasons, a move to rid the alphabet of graphemes using diacritics was made and one year later a new version was ready. On December 13, 1930, the Presidium of the Scientific Investigation Association at the institute presented a version of the Unified Northern Alphabet to the Scientific Council of the USSR’s Central Committee on Alphabet Adaptation (Russian: Всесоюзного центрального комитета нового алфавита). The same body discussed the draft again on December 18 and it was approved on February 23, 1931. The scientific section of Narkompros approved the draft in May the same year.

The alphabet consisted of 39 letters: 29 consonants and 10 vowels. In addition, some letters were marked with diacritics to show palatalization, length and aspiration.

An intensive and systematic publishing campaign was launched immediately after the alphabet had been formally approved. From 1939 to 1949, approximately 300 experts were employed by the institute.

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