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In Soviet and post-Soviet studies, a titular nation is the single dominant ethnic group of a federated state, after which the state is typically named. It is sometimes applied to other multiethnic states.
In the Soviet Union, these were autonomous entities within the union: Soviet republics, autonomous republics, autonomous regions, and so on, such as Byelorussian SSR for Belarusians.
For an ethnos to be a Soviet titular nation, it had to satisfy certain criteria[clarification needed] in terms of the amount of population and compactness of its settlement. The language of a titular nation was declared an additional (after Russian) official language of the corresponding administrative unit.[citation needed]
