Comment 3 for bug 173524

I have found a way to reproduce this bug, install any package that pulls in ispell, and /usr/lib/ispell/ becomes populated. This breaks the call from emacs to aspell for some reason, and ispell gets used instead. Now since there is no english ispell dictionary installed, spell checking stops working (at least partly). See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dictionaries-common/+bug/179523
A temporary fix for the problem is to run

 sudo apt-get autoremove ispell

This will however break other dependencies.

To get spell checking working in emacs for your native language run

sudo apt-get install aspell-ru

I noticed that installing language-support-sv adds ispell-sv instead of aspell-sv as it should have.