From a January 12, 2026 Jamestown Foundation report by Vadim Shtepa:

The Karelian language has no official status in Russia because it is written in the Latin alphabet, as only those written in Cyrillic can be official languages of Russian republics.

Thus, I learned that only languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet can be granted “official status” in Russia. This reminded me of something I learned which inspired me to write Similarities between Moldovan and Romanian on The New Leaf Journal in 2023. A report about Moldova changing its official state language from Moldovan to Romanian explained that the main difference between the highly similar languages is that Moldovan uses the Cyrillic alphabet while Romanian uses the Latin alphabet.