The ideology of bourgeois nationalism and standard Slovak

The development of the Slovak standard language in its modern history (the 20th century) is accompanied with polemics and alternation of purist and assimilation efforts conditioned by language planning in the range of political ideology. The efforts are primarily focused on Czech language influence on Slovak and they are manifested in an acceptance and support of the Czech influence on one hand and the prescriptive delimitation of the Slovak language on the other hand. The paper focuses on the period of the 1950’s and 1960’s, which is characterised by two opposite approaches: 1) a conscious and politically supported convergence of Slovak and Czech in the end of the 1950’s and beginning of the 1960’s and a refusing of any kind of purism in regulation of the language development, and 2) a rise of purist approaches and efforts to protect the Slovak standard language from Czech interferences in the middle of the 1960’s. A corpus planning discourse of this period, which is analysed in this article, reflects the interconnection between political ideology and language regulation and it represents an exclusive source for sociolinguistic investigation.