Language issues have played a large part in the nationalist discourse and in the shaping of new and transformed national identities in the post-Soviet states: witness the requirement to learn Estonian built into the citizenship legislation of Estonia and the return to the Latin script in the Central Asian states. Cases such as these could be subsumed under the heading of language planning, whether in the form of attempts to purge the language of foreign elements or of legislation on language use. No less significant is what has been described as the ‘impromptu linguistics’ of politicians and civil servants. Although the tenets of this form of linguistics bear only a passing resemblance to those of contemporary linguistic scholarship, their consequences are vastly more significant than those of the beliefs held by linguistics professionals. Implicitly or explicitly, they underlie irredentism, ethnic conflict, mass migration and ethnic cleansing, and the redrawing of national and regional boundaries. A key element in such politicised linguistics and the discourse of nation-building in many of the post-Soviet states is myths about language. Since the publication of Anthony D. Smith's The Ethnic Revival (1981) and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983), to name but two of the most distinguished contributions to the subject, the importance of myth, belief and self-image in the formation of group identity has been acknowledged to be a crucial factor in the emergence of many nationalisms.