LL-L "Language politics" 2005.04.25 (02) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 25.APR.2005 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Helge Tietz <helgetietz at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2005.04.24 (03) [E]


Dear Lowlanders

This article about Irish just sounds too similar of what I have seen and
heard concerning Maori in New Zealand, is Hebrew really going to be the only
language successfully revived? To a certain degree we could perhaps count
Latvian as enjoying a revival because it is now the working language in the
streets of Riga, I have not encountered any shopkeeper or or official who
would not understand and respond in Latvian though many of them are of
Russian origin, my Latvian friends would never speak to any shopkeeper or
official in Russian these days though that was different 15 years ago. The
trend towards Russian has indeed reversed, the reason are probably various,
the fact that Latvian is in Latin script in contrast to Russian might help
because that makes it easier to learn from there the "world language"
English. Perhaps all that would have been different if Latvia had remained a
part of a Russian-dominated state for another 100 years or so, perhaps we
woul d then witness what happened to Irish, Maori, Low Saxon etc.to Latvian
as well. 50 years of Russian dominance was obviously not enough to make a
substantial change.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language politics

Thanks, Helge.

It's interesting you mentioned the example of Latvian.  It brings up the
question as to what extent language reassertion efforts can and should be
taken.

Please do not misunderstand me.  I am just wondering about it and about what
others feel, and I feel we need to examine several sides of the issue.  Is
it a case of "desperate times require desperate measures" and "all that
counts is survival"?  I think that this may be an area where language rights
and human rights clearly touch each other and may even clash with each
other, and different countries will view sa given situation differently
depending on their particular visions of human rights and democracy.

Under the Soviet system, Russian clearly muffled and suffocated other
languages, much like other power languages in multilingual political
structures have been doing.  The Soviet system, despite a Russification and
"denationalization" agenda, at least payed lip service to regional and
minority languages and made them official, which can not be said of other
countries, including some in the West.  Especially the closely related
languages (namely Belarusian and Ukrainian) lost scores of speakers because
the education and media systems favored this and transition from them to
Russian is relatively easy.  While the *main* languages of the newly
independent states now have a chance to reassert themselves, the languages
of Russia, even within the autonomous regions, are still giving way to
Russian. However, the minority languages of the former Soviet republics are
now being eaten away at by the official non-Russian power languages.  These
are not just the indigenous languages (such as Livonian in the case of
Latvia) but also Russian, Ukrainian and other imported "colonial" languages,
even though in several cases Russian is not an actual minority language,
just a quasi-minority, formerly powerful and now officially undesirable
language.

While it is certainly understandable that language reassertion requires
restructuring of the education and communication systems, among others, you
have to ask yourself how far you can go in restricting people's linguistic
rights, and this means *all* people, including Russians and Russified
non-Russians.  Should we relapse and go for payback for their ancestors'
transgressions, saying "become *real* Latvians or get out"?  Very few
Russians in those nations *chose* to live there.  Do they not have the right
to use their language and retain their ethnicity? Should they not have the
right to have private media organizations that use Russian only?  Should
they not have the right to use Russian signage for their private businesses,
with Latvian as an auxiliary, much like Chinese businesses do all over the
world when they display signs in Chinese with auxiliary versions in the
various majority languages?  Unless things have changed since I last visited
there, public display of Chinese characters is illegal in Indonesia, not
display of Arabic, English or other languages.  Whichever way you turn it,
this is a blatantly discriminatory, anti-Chinese policy, and the reasons I
was given for this boil down to taking power away from the Chinese, forcing
them to become "real Indonesians," and "they had it coming after all they
did to us in concert with the Dutch."  When the Latvian language police
patrols the streets on the lookout for non-Latvian signage, focussing on
Russian signage, with other foreign signs or just words (e.g., "pizza,"
"hamburger" or "calzone") prohibited as an afterthought for the sake of
consistency -- does this not amount to pretty much the same type of
discrimination and thus to infringement of individuals' rights?  Is this not
a case of
"Académie Française, Foras na Gaeilge, Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge,
Údarás na Gaeltachta, etc. gone berserk"?

Requiring display of Irish along with English in Ireland is one thing.
Prohibiting the display of English and all other languages would be an
entirely different thing, would it not?

OK, so I'm kind of playing the devil's advocate here.  But think about it!
Honestly, I feel that discrimination is discrimination, irrespective of
who's the target.  I don't care if the discriminated "had it coming" in
popular opinion, especially if they are merely the heirs of the alleged
misdeeds and the undesirable heritage.  Where this sort of attitude of
revenge can land us can be figured out easily by going back just a few
decades or by looking all around us even now.  Is this the sort of thing we
want to be involved in?

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

***

LATVIA TRIES TO FIGHT RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

--Lawmakers hope speech law can save nation's native tongue--

By Steven C. Johnson

_San Jose Mercury News_ 1/23/01

Riga, Latvia – Contemporary Russian music is the rage in Latvia's capital,
but when listeners is the rage in Latvia's capital, but when listeners tuned
in for their daily dose of dance tracks on popular radio station they got
nothing but dead air.

Radio Bizness and Baltic was silenced for three days, caught in the
cross-fire of a battle to defend the Latvian language from extinction.

The law requires 75 percent of all commercials and chat to be in Latvian,
but Radio Bizness' target audience is Russians living in Latvia, says Ivo
Bankavs, its chief engineer. "They want to know what's new in Russian music;
they want to keep up with trends in Moscow; and they want DJs to speak
Russian."

The station is now in court fighting to keep its license.

The struggle stems from the fear of ethnic Latvians that their language may
be swamped by Russian. Nearly 40 percent of the country's 2.4 million people
use Russian as their main language, and often speak little or no Latvian at
all, so the government is aggressively promoting Latvian with tough laws on
public speech.

In the neighboring Baltic republic of Lithuania, whose language is similar
to Latvian, such worries are less pronounced, perhaps because nearly 85
percent of the people are ethnic Lithuanians.

Estonia, whose native tongue is a close cousin to Finnish, has similar
language laws to Latvia's, but also seems less anxious. Seventy percent of
its people are ethnic Estonians.

The Soviet Union annexed Latvia in 1940, and the Latvian language was
overwhelmed by Russian during the country's five decades as a Soviet
republic. Soon after the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Latvian-only signs
went up and bilingual Soviet-era signs in Cyrillic were crudely scratched
out.

But many towns and villages remain predominantly Russian, and TV viewers in
Latvia can tune directly Moscow channels.

The language law requires Latvian to be used at public events, and a
government body devises Latvian equivalents to replace borrowed foreign
words. A language police corps tries to ensure that everyone from doctors to
bus drivers speaks enough Latvian to do their jobs.

Eighteen inspectors roam the country, making surprise visits to police
departments or hailing taxi cabs to test the drivers' Latvian skills. Last
year, more than 3,000 inspections were made, and 2,500 people were fined
from one to 50 lats, or less than $2 to $80, a healthy chunk of the average
monthly wage of $240.

The government says the inspectors often let offenders off with a warning,
and insists they have so far never forced anyone out of a job or permanently
closed a business.

"I am 100 percent sure that we must regulate these because this is the only
place in all the world where the Latvian language can survive," said Baldurs
Apinis, vice chairman of the radio and television council, which wants to
shut down Radio Bizness.

Many Russians say that even when they try to learn Latvian, they are
resented.

"The language is used as a stick to beat us," said Aleksandrs Rhzavin, an
ethnic Russian who belongs to a group that campaigns for expanded cultural
rights for Russians.

Russian speakers claim the law is often used to silence unpopular views.

In 1997, Russian schoolteachers Anatonia Ignatane, a critic of government
policy to close Russian schools, campaigned for a seat on the Riga City
Council. Just before the election, language inspectors claimed her Latvian
skills were not up to holding public office.

"The laws are applied very selectively," said left-wing lawmaker Boris
Cilevics, a Russian-speaker who helped Ignatane take discrimination
allegations to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, where a finding is pending.
"If there's someone they want to punish, they just find fault with his
language abilities."

During Soviet times, many Latvians feared their language would one day die.
Philologist Ieva Zuicena, who co-wrote the language law, compiled a Latvian
dictionary in the 1970s and reflected that she was "writing a monument to a
soon-to-be lost language."

Now officials feel they have a second chance, even if they can't restore the
times when Latvians and their language were dominant.

They're certainly not dominant anymore.

The Soviets imposed a Russiciation policy that brought thousands of Russian
and Ukranian workers to Latvia to work in factories and stamp out
nationalist sentiment.

In Daugavpils, Latvia's largest city after Riga, Russians make up 87 percent
of the population and you can go days without hearing a word of Latvian.
Still, every street sign is in Latvian, as are announcements at the bus
station.

Though many Russians remain monolingual, waiters and shop assistants often
will use Latvian, or at least broken Latvian, before resorting to Russian or
English.

Latvian also has become the language of business and higher education, and
Russians need it to get good jobs.

"The idea that we don't want to learn Latvian, that we're lazy is a myth,"
said Leonids Raihmans, a Russian civil rights campaigner. "We just don't
want to become Latvian and abandon our culture."

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