Estonian language policy

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Article in today's /New York Times/, worth a read:

Tallinn Journal
ESTONIA RAISES ITS PENCILS TO ERASE RUSSIAN
===========================================
By Clifford J. Levy
Published June 7, 2010

TALLINN, Estonia -- Sometime before year's end, a man with a clipboard 
will drop by one of this city's best schools, the Tallinn Pae Gymnasium, 
and the staff will begin to fret. He will saunter from classroom to 
classroom, ignoring the children and instead engaging in seemingly 
trivial chitchat with many of the teachers, 20 minutes at a time.

Tell me, what subjects are your specialties? How long have you worked 
here? Can you explain to me a little about how you prepare your lessons?

He will not be particularly interested in what they say. He will care 
only about how they say it.

So watch that grammar. The language inspector is coming.

Estonia, a small former Soviet republic on the Baltic Sea, has been 
mounting a determined campaign to elevate the status of its native 
language and to marginalize Russian, the tongue of its former colonizer. 
That has turned public schools like the Pae Gymnasium, where the 
children have long been taught in Russian, into linguistic battlegrounds.

Because Pae's administrators and teachers are state employees, they are 
now required to have a certain proficiency in Estonian and to use it in 
more classes. The National Language Inspectorate, a government agency 
that is not exactly beloved in Russian-speaking pockets of Estonia, is 
charged with ensuring that the law is followed.

The language inspectorate has the right to fine or discipline public 
employees who do not speak competent Estonian. While the agency has only 
18 inspectors, it is such a provocative symbol of the country's language 
regulations that even Amnesty International has criticized its tactics 
as heavy-handed.

...

Read the full article:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/europe/08estonia.html>

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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