Stalin on language and superstructure

Note 10. To the Subsection “3. Dialectical Logic (Marxist Logic)

In response to the question “Is it true that language is a superstructure on the base?”, Stalin clearly denied the view that a new language will be established in place of the Russian language as follows: “In this respect language radically differs from the superstructure. Take, for example, Russian society and the Russian language. In the course of the past thirty years the old, capitalist base has been eliminated in Russia and a new, socialist base has been built…. But in spite of this the Russian language has remained basically what it was before the October Revolution…. As to the basic stock of words and the grammatical system of the Russian language, which constitute the foundation of a language, they, after the elimination of the capitalist base, far from having been eliminated and supplanted by a new basic word stock and a new grammatical system of the language, have been preserved in their entirety and have not undergone any serious changes―they have been preserved precisely as the foun-dation of the modern Russian language.” Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 3-5.