[lg policy] Dyer: Latvia: language rights

Harold Schiffman haroldfs at gmail.com
Fri Apr 6 14:21:23 UTC 2018


Dyer: Latvia: language rights

   - Apr. 5, 2018 6:30 a.m.


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Lots of countries have two or more official languages: Canada (two),
Belgium (three), Switzerland (four), South Africa (11), India (23), and so
on. They all have trouble balancing the competing demands of the various
language groups. But Latvia has only one official language, and it has a
bigger problem than any of them.

“There’s no need for a second language. Whoever wants can use their
language at home or in school,” said Latvian President Andris Berzins in
2012, when there was a (failed) referendum about making Russian a second
official language in Latvia. But on Monday Berzin’s successor, President
Raimonds Vejonis, signed a new law decreeing that Russian will no longer be
used in secondary schools.

Even Russian-speaking high-school students will be taught only in Latvian
by 2021, Vejonis said: “It will make society more cohesive and the state
stronger.” Freely translated, that means it will make Latvian society less
Russian.

The Russian-language media exploded in outrage at the news, and in Moscow
Tuesday the Russian Duma (parliament) passed a resolution urging Vladimir
Putin’s government to impose sanctions in Latvia. The Russian foreign
ministry said that the new measure was “part of the discriminatory policy
of the forceful assimilation of Russian-speaking people that has been
conducted for the past 25 years.”

That is true. The long-term goal of Latvia’s language policies is obviously
the assimilation of the Russian-speaking minority – but it is a huge task.
Russian-speakers were 42 per cent of the population when Latvia got its
independence back from the Soviet Union in 1991, and if you include those
who speak Latvian at work but Russian at home they still account for at
least a third.

So the Russians certainly have a right to complain – but look at it from a
Latvian point of view. The Latvians got their independence from the Russian
empire in 1918, but were re-conquered by its successor, the Soviet Union,
in 1940. (The Nazi-Soviet Pact, the starting gun for the Second World War,
divided Poland between the two totalitarian regimes, but the Soviet Union
got all of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.)

The Soviet secret police then murdered or deported most of the Latvian
political, intellectual and cultural elite: between 35,000 and 60,000
people. So the Latvians welcomed the German attack on Russia in 1941, which
freed Latvia from the Soviet occupation, and many of them fought alongside
the German army until the Russians conquered Latvia yet again in 1944.

By then Stalin had concluded that the Latvians were incorrigibly
‘disloyal’, and decided to solve the problem permanently by overwhelming
them with immigrants from Russia. The proportion of Latvian native-speakers
in the population dropped from 80 per cent in 1935 to barely half (52 per
cent) by 1989 – and most of the immigrants never bothered to learn Latvian,
because the entire Soviet Union worked in Russian.

The Latvians were on the road to linguistic and cultural extinction until
they got their independence back, so you can see why they want to
‘Latvianise’ this huge, uninvited immigrant presence in their midst as fast
as possible. But now look at it from the position of the Russian-speakers
again.

Most of the current generation are not immigrants at all. They were born in
Latvia, before or after independence, and they grew up in the familiar
streets of Riga or Daugavpils, part of a large Russian-speaking community
among whom they feel comfortably at home. They have no other home.

Yet they know they will never be accepted as fully Latvian even if they
learn to speak the language fluently. And since they mostly get their news
and views from Russian media, which portray Latvia’s allies in the European
Union and NATO as relentlessly anti-Russian, Latvian-speakers don’t even
trust the Russian minority to be loyal in a crisis.

On the other hand, why should Russian-speakers in Latvia go along with
measures that are clearly designed to shrink the role of Russian in the
country’s life? There is no right or wrong here.

The Latvian-speakers will have to accept that the Russian minority is a
permanent presence in their country, and the Russian-speakers will have to
accept that preserving the endangered Latvian language and culture comes
first. They are both having trouble getting to that point, but there is
really no alternative.

*Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in
45 countries*


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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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