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<h1>Latvia: Language Rights</h1>
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Added 5th April 2018 10:23 AM
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“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
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<a href="https://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1474893/latvia-language-rights"><img src="https://www.newvision.co.ug/w-images/dea228a2-120d-498c-802f-e08e1f63f630/1/GwynneDyer-703x422.jpg" alt="Gwynnedyer 703x422"></a>
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Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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<p><strong>By Gwynne Dyer</strong></p>
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<p><strong>Lots of countries have two or more official languages: Canada
(two), Belgium (three), Switzerland (four), South Africa (eleven),
India (twenty-three), 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.</strong><br><br>“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.<br><br>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.<br><br>The
Russian-language media exploded in outrage at the news, and in Moscow on
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.”<br><br>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 percent 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.<br><br>The discrimination has been blatant from
the start. After independence Russian-speakers whose home was in Latvia
were excluded from citizenship unless they could pass a Latvian language
test. About half the Russian-speaking population couldn’t or wouldn’t,
so around 13 percent of the people in Latvia are russophone
‘non-citizens’ without the right to vote, hold public office, or take
government jobs.<br><br>It has long been the case in Latvia that
university is only free for students doing their studies in Latvian, and
that primary schools for minority language groups (mainly Russian but
also Ukrainian, Yiddish, Roma, etc.) must teach Latvian from the first
grade. Since 2004 at least 60 percent of instruction in secondary
schools has had to be in Latvian. And by 2021 it will have to be all
Latvian in the high schools all of the time.<br><br>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.)<br><br>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.<br><br>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 percent in 1935 to
barely half (52 percent) by 1989 – and most of the immigrants never
bothered to learn Latvian, because the entire Soviet Union worked in
Russian.<br><br>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.<br><br>Most of the current generations 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br><strong><em>The writer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries</em></strong></p></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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