[lg policy] Estonia Raises Pencil to Erase Russian

Tue Jun 8 14:21:11 UTC 2010

June 7, 2010
Estonia Raises Pencil to Erase Russian

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

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. The Tallinn Pae Gymnasium prides itself
on grooming students who can recite Pushkin as well as any Muscovite,
and it places a high value on the quality of its staff and
instruction. So it was a bit humiliating when, at its most recent
Estonian language inspection in December 2008, about a third of the
school’s 60 teachers failed. At this point, teachers are generally not
fired or disciplined for poor knowledge of Estonian.

Those who failed are already dreading the next visit, which could
occur at any time. “He wrote a report saying that I understood all the
questions, that I answered all the questions, but that I made errors,”
said Olga Muravyova, a biology and geography teacher, laughing
nervously as she recalled her last meeting with the inspector. “That
is actually what he claimed,” Ms. Muravyova said. “Of course, that is
hard to hear.”  After the inspector failed her, he told her to attend
Estonian classes, which she has tried to do. But she is 57, an age
when it is not easy to pick up a new language, let alone one as
devilishly complex as Estonian, which is far different from Russian.
(Estonian is closely related to Finnish, and the two languages are
among the very few spoken in Europe that are not part of the
Indo-European family.)

While the examination is mostly a conversation in Estonian, even those
who passed said it was unpleasant. “In all honestly, it was
difficult,” said Natalya Shirokova, an English teacher. “I was anxious
about it before I took it. And during it as well. It was stressful,
emotionally speaking. I think that it was one of those teacher things.
Horrible to make a mistake, to do something incorrect.”  The tension
over the status of Estonian reflects a debate across the former Soviet
Union over the primacy of native languages and the role of Russian.
For hundreds of years, the Soviets and the czars before them mandated
Russian in the lands that they dominated. That helped to unite
disparate peoples and ensure loyalty to a central authority. Yet,
local tongues, including Estonian, were often suppressed.

Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, newly independent former Soviet
republics have tried to bolster national identities by promoting their
languages. Linguistic brush fires have erupted across the former
Soviet space. The Kremlin, aware that the Russian language’s retreat
could reduce its influence, has protested restrictive language laws in
its neighbors, including Estonia. The issue is particularly
contentious in Estonia and nearby Latvia because those countries
generally require fluency in their languages to obtain citizenship.
Ethnic Russians and other Russian speakers who were in the two
countries after independence have as a result sometimes been unable to
become citizens.

In Estonia, 30 percent of the 1.3 million people speak Russian as a
first language, and the government seems bent on employing the schools
to lower that figure. Russian is even more prevalent in Tallinn, the
capital, a legacy of the Soviet era, when many outsiders were
resettled here.  Ilmar Tomusk, director general of the National
Language Inspectorate, said that inspectors tested the Estonian
language ability of all sorts of government workers, from clerks to
bus drivers.  “But the most important problem in our whole language
policy is the teachers in the Russian-medium schools,” he said. “The
language level of teachers is lower than what we demand from
students.”

He said nearly half of the public schools in Tallinn are
Russian-language, and the government is imposing new rules that
require them to teach 60 percent of subjects in Estonian in the upper
grades. Schools like the Pae Gymnasium — which has 575 students, ages
7 to 19 — will be essentially transformed from Russian-language to
bilingual. But they cannot comply if teachers speak poor Estonian, he
said. He defended his agency, saying it was caricatured by
Russian-speaking politicians in Estonia and their allies in Moscow.
“There are some myths about our work, about how we discriminate,” he
said. “For a democratic society, it is quite common that public
servants should know the state language. If a public official is in
Russia, he must know the Russian language. If he is in Estonia, he
must know Estonian. There is no discrimination.”

The director of the Pae Gymnasium, Izabella Riitsaar, who is
bilingual, said she had good relations with the inspectors. She said
they were polite, told her when they planned to arrive and permitted
her to observe exams. “I believe that a person who lives in this
country has to speak this country’s language, even though it can
create all kinds of problems,” Ms. Riitsaar said.  But did she
sympathize with her teachers?  “Of course! No one likes taking exams.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/europe/08estonia.html?scp=1&sq=Estonian&st=cse

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 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/

-------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list