Re: Baltic scores well in multilingual Europe


martin wrote:
Peteris Cedrinš (Peteris Cedrins) wrote:
Not that sort of pendulum principle, and not here, sorry. The political
pendulum we want is toward democracy and a civil, open society -- leave
Belarus out of it, please. If your pendulum is "Russkies smacked us on
the heads," "now we smack Russkies on the heads," then there can be no
advancement of any kind. Fortunately, that is not the case -- the
pendulum has basically been towards individual freedom. Most people hit
on the head think that hitting on the head is bad, and are wise enough
to act accordingly.

Well smacking people on the head has worked very well for Russia,
expanding its influence into areas that were never natively Russian,
while those who think they are above smacking people on the head have
essentially been liquidated. Like it or not, its the uncompromising
attitudes of GK, Henry and Vidas, as you call it "zoological
nationalism", that has saved Lithuania from the ravages of russifcation
during the Soviet period, simply because most Russians were too scared
to immigrate into Lithuania.

Lithuania was comparatively better off with regard to russification
primarily because it was less industrialized and more agricultural. You
do not teach people languages by smacking them on the head.

The Netherlands may be introducing Dutch for immigrants -- at the same
time, Frisian is also official in the Netherlands. You cannot confuse
at least half of the Russians with immigrants, sorry, nor can you
confuse indigenous minorities with other minorities, nor can you expect
that small countries recently coming into existence have a language
situation that is national, nor can you confuse a state language with a
_lingua franca_ -- the conditions under which we came into existence as
nation-states in the first place were multicultural, and in the case of
Latvia and Lithuania minority rights were crucial to international
acceptance (I mean ca. 1920, not ca. 1990).

It's ironic that those who cite the multiculturalism of the 1920s to
support their cause are the same people who arrived under a system that
destroyed this multiculturalism in 1940s.

There are many people who support multiculturalism who are not among
those who arrived under the Soviet system, and most of those who
arrived under the Soviet system had as little choice in that system as
anybody else. My point with the head smacking metaphor is quite simple
-- two wrongs don't make a right.

Pointing to how Russia treats its minorities is the very worst thing
you can do, in my opinion. Russia is a nasty empire, not a small
democratic country. A person who speaks Russian here is a person who
speaks Russian here, not an imperial subject of an alien empire. The
quickest way to get that person to sympathize with that empire is by
confusing those things.

Well the decendants of french speaking Norman conquerors eventually
assimulated into english speaking Britain, so why not the decendants of
Russian speaking conquerors of the Baltics?

The situation is very different and our approach is very different (and
anyway, the Norman Conquest resulted in Anglo-Norman). Common language
was formerly mostly a local matter, and often divided by class -- the
language at University was Latin, the administrative languages in the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania were Ruthenian and Latin, etc.

This ain't the Netherlands -- I never saw any of these comparisons make
sense. Where I respect Latvians the most is in our care for how people
feel about their languages, and in a deep respect for people trying to
preserve their language and identity. I often see that even among
ethnocentric nationalists -- what is asked for is respect, not
assimilation or erasure. I simply assume that a Russian speaker wants
to retain his language and culture, and I do not see such retention as
threatening.

I can understand an ethnic Russian wanting to prserve his language and
culture, but what of other Russian speakers. So how does an Armenian
preserve his identity better by insisting his children speak Russian?

He doesn't necessarily do so, but it isn't always so simple -- many
people are multilingual, and many people who aren't Russian identify
more with Russian (most Jews, for example).

We have anyway moved to a point where most young Russians know Latvian
-- the argument has to go from there, and it all becomes awful if you
ask people for the impossible. As Stranga says, do you really expect
the eight in ten Russophones in Daugavpils to "integrate" into the two
in ten Letts? What exactly are you asking for? What would make you
happy?

You railed against the Baltic Germans and their language which
dominated the cities, but you are perfectly comfortable that these
cities are now russophone while the country side remain lettophone. You
railed against lettophones having to speak German in order to attend
university, yet if Latvian cities remain russophone, would you object
if you had to learn Russian to attend university?

I didn't say anything about being perfectly comfortable. Latvian cities
are hardly entirely Russophone (and really you are misquoting and
re-interpreting what I said about German, too). I support the language
law (though I do think the focus on the language of administration is
ill-conceived), and I support education reform (though not the form it
has taken). The fact is that about half of the Russians now speak
Latvian, and among younger people that percentage is far higher. Among
younger Lettophones, the knowledge of Russian is declining. This is all
as it should be, to my mind, and I don't doubt that many Russians will
assimilate and don't think assimilation is intrinsically negative.
Latvian is the sole state language, and Latvian is establishing itself
as the language of inter-ethnic communication. All of that is
hunky-dory -- phasing out Russian (and/or other minority language)
education entirely, however, which is what some people would like to
see, would be another matter. Doing this in an underhanded way would be
yet another matter.

I would object if Lettophones had to learn Russian to attend
University, but I do think they are much better off learning Russian.
In some disciplines it is a tremendous advantage, and Russian is still
a major language here. It can be (and has been) declared "foreign," but
it is obviously not foreign for more than a third of the population and
has a considerable history here -- that history is _not_ exclusively
negative by any means.

It boils down to respect -- without it, you can't ask for it in return.
It might make sense to Hui and Henry that "everybody in Latvia be
Latvian," but it makes no sense at all for real people in their real
linguistic lives. These are not wandering Arabs integrating into a
wealthy, established, democratic country but people _from_ here
reacting to power, one which has for all practical purposes rejected
them -- there is almost no space at all for them to "integrate" into,
and if you doubt that you need only read the stuff in this group. If
you think you can say "I hate you, I wish you weren't here, and you
don't speak my language," and then expect people to love your language
and love you, you are truly deluded. There are variations on that, but
that is the situation in which many find themselves.

This is why there needs to be one language, so that there is no
resentment that "you don't speak my language", and then it's less
likely that one would say "I hate you, I wish you weren't here". That's
human nature and no amount of idealism will change that. Sure, people
can preserve their language in their own time, but there needs to be a
common language if you want a cohesive society. It is no coincidence
that successful countries are also strongly integrationist and in the
main monolingual.

The necessity of a common language and the problem of asymmetrical
bilingualism are no longer as central to these issues because the
trends have already been successfully reversed -- there are still
problems, and in certain areas these are severe, but I think one can
pretty much assume that twenty years from now or so Latvian will be
well-established. There may be some "ghettos," and there may be _more_
of a problem with the bigotry that language issues sometimes mask (I
would assume that when large scale immigration begins [and I think that
is a "when," not an "if"] there will be language policies applied to it
-- whether they will be effective if much of the immigration is Slavic,
as is quite possible, is probably dubious...).

There are many extremely successful countries that are not at all
monolingual (Switzerland, Spain, Luxembourg, Finland, Canada, etc.) --
they are all very different and each situation is unique. The idea that
"there needs to be one language" very often does more damage than good
-- suppressing Catalan and Basque did not lead to integration, and a
civilized country like Britain can support Welsh rather than see its
recovery as divisive; to put it simply, pressures often have the
opposite effect, as that study of Klaipėda 1923-1939 suggested: "The
forms of Lithuanization policy were not acceptable for Klaipėda region
local _lietuvininkai_ people. Having no other alternatives, they
started to nestle themselves with much more known for them German
national identity." A country that has long practiced a dramatically
"integrationist" policy with an emphasis on an assimilationist model,
France, doesn't seem too cohesive to me. Romanian nationalists railed
against granting the Hungarian minority rights -- but I don't see
Romania breaking up since those rights were extended.

We've anyway drifted far away from the subject that provoked me --
Latvia is anyway quite different from Lithuania because it was much
more heavily russified, and the Lithuanian language is not nearly as
threatened as Latvian is. The narrow-mindedness of GK and Henry makes
even less sense.

Regards,
/P

.

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