A number of languages, including regional ones, are missing from this survey. The languages of the many national minorities, which constitute small colonies in town and countryside (see, 1927), do not strictly enter into our linguistic pattern and, even if admitted, would not alter its characteristic outlines. Among such languages are various Balkan types, Baluchi (Beluji) in Turkestan, the modified Indie of the Gypsies, and marginal languages like Asiatic Eskimo and Aleut, mainly on North-East Siberian islands, Kurdish in Transcaucasia, ‘Moldavian’ (a Rumanian dialect) in the Moldavian Federal Republic, Finnish in the Garelo-Finnish Republic, and Polish. These languages have their focus of characterisation outside the Soviet frontiers along with the two types of Germanic—-German and Yiddish, both of which are used by a considerable body of speakers inside the revised frontiers of the U.S.S.R. and exhibit distinct regional associations, the first with the former German Republic on the lower Volga and the partitioned and annexed East Prussia, the second with White Russia and the Ukraine and the artificially created Birobijan (Jewish Autonomous Province), north of the middle Amur in Eastern Siberia.

For ease of recognition and reference I have yielded to the inertia of tradition and reluctantly abandoned the innovations in nomenclature which I advocated in the epitome of this book ‘The Language Pattern of the U.S.S.R.’ (The Slavonic and East European Review, xxv, 65, London, 1947) and necessarily the Confucian epigraph with which I pointed and emphasised them. My position in this matter remains unchanged. I am still persuaded that, for the sake of clarity, terms like ‘ Somian’ (new to English) for ‘Finnic’, ‘Turanian’ for ‘Turkic’, ‘Iverian’ for ‘South Caucasian’, and, for the sake of brevity, terms like ‘Aryan’ (taken from Sweet by Jespersen) for the awkward and inanimate ‘Indo-European’ are eminently desirable. Everyone acquainted with English books on languages, especially those of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, will, I think, admit that our linguistic name-giving stands in serious need of revision.

In most cases I mechanically reproduce the Russian name and spelling of a particular language (e.g. ‘Kirgiz’ for ‘Kirghiz’, ‘Uigur’ for ‘Uyghur’, etc.) and leave the name in its radical form, i.e. without the Anglo-Latin ending -ian or the Anglo-Greek -ic.