Some sounds have homes. Others don’t. We tend to imagine sounds as naturally housed by letters of an alphabet. But sometimes the shapes given to sounds can be more like a prison than a place to call home. Between 1927 and 1991, the languages of 25 million peoples in the Soviet empire changed alphabets once, twice, and sometimes even three times. This is the story of fugitive sounds in search of shelter…
The letters on the carpet represent different Cyrillic letters or graphic forms imposed by the Soviets on non-Russian speaking peoples.
