Polyglot Meets Linguistic Political Football in Latvia
When nationalist politics meets language learning, there are several practical takeaways for expatriate students living in the country where this language is used to play political football and becomes the test for your residence:
Language and National?Identity
In Latvia language is national identity, as in most of Europe. This is celebrated with the May 13 national language day….
Some nationalistic Latvians celebrate their identity by celebrating NOT knowing their neighbors’ language, specifically Russian:
Many nationalistic Latvians do not accept that Latvia, like Miami or Barcelona, will be bilingual forever. They wish to permanently uproot Russian in response to Soviet era Russification. They ignore that not knowing the language of your enormous and dangerous neighbor is a very bad idea. Also, Latvia’s skilled, tech-savvy workforce that knows Russian is a key component of Latvian economic success.
https://www.integration.lv/: My Bridge to?Schengen
Since the Latvian language is such a large part of Latvian identity, the Latvian state had to figure out a fair answer to a simple question: how does a non-Latvian become Latvian. EU membership meant the old blood and soil definition of national identity, with its passports that listed its holder’s “nationality” as a category (Latvian, Russian, Azeri, Jew) separate from citizenship was obsolete. In the pre-EU Latvia of the late ’90s my brother had had extended discussions with Latvia’s foreign minister about why Jews considered this practice a dangerous anachronism.
How to integrate all the foreigners who’ve come to stay in this beautiful, empty, green country, be they:
So the government set up a system of free language courses for foreigners, now that Latvia was changing from a poor country that exported talent to a rich(er) country that imported talent. I joined a basic (A1) level course in the fall of 2019.
Years earlier I’d begun to learn a rather specialized Latvian by buying, renovating, renting and then selling apartments here with my brother from 1998–2010. Locals found it funny that my vocabulary was limited to sales contract, property owner, premises for rent, power of attorney, mortgage, escrow agreement, land book, rental apartment. When my Riga Business School students asked how I’d ended up in Latvia, I explained that I came for real estate, found a wife, divorced the real estate and the wife kept me.
Life here flows easily, even compared to my prior long term stays in Spain, Catalonia and Alpine Italy. There I’d learned Spanish, Catalan and Italian the last two through full immersion courses with female dictionaries. My French was less fluent due to shorter duration immersion. Two forty-something Marseillaise French sisters in Villefranche-sur-Mer adopted me in the summer of 1986 for only six weeks (they were already married; c’est la vie).
So in 2019 I decided to upgrade from year to year residence through marriage to permanent residence by learning Latvian, though not because I was worried about my wife deporting her beachfront trophy husband.
This would require passing the A2 level test in the official state language (levels run from A1–3, B1–3, C1–3).
Latvia isn’t the only EU state requiring language proficiency to get permanent residence. Poland requires a higher B1 level, France toughened its language requirement in 2018 and Finland requires a proficiency test in one of its two official languages, Finnish or Swedish. So what happened when an overconfident polyglot who’d always learned easier latin languages by osmosis collided with a state language policy that links residents’ language proficiency to state sovereignty?
Language and State Sovereignty
First, a brief detour into why governments link language and sovereignty. When I taught at Riga Business School I asked my students a simple question: what’s the official language of the United States of America? They all replied English. They were dumbfounded when told they were unanimously wrong and told there isn’t one. Language is not a federal question. You can vote in Mandarin and Spanish in New York and there’s an elementary school in Queens that teaches students in 57 different languages. American xenophobes constantly complain about immigrants who don’t know English. But language and sovereignty are legally unlinked, an unrecognized fringe benefit of running a planetary empire.
But the Israeli case nixes that theory. Until Bibi the Bigot demoted Arabic from official status, the language of the people who’d tried to destroy the state since 1948 was one of Israel’s four official languages, along with Hebrew, Russian and English. India, with thirteen major languages and hundreds of others, doesn’t link language and sovereignty. Neither do East African states like Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, in which Kiswahili and English are the common languages everywhere.
But these East African and Indian exceptions aren’t typical in Europe, where only Switzerland, with its five languages, decouples language and national identity. In the rest of Europe, even in those states with large linguistic minorities — Romania (Hungarian Transylvania), Bulgaria (Turks), Italy (German-speaking Alto Adige/Sudtirol), Spain (Catalans, Basques, Gallegos), France (Catalan, Basque, Breton, Corsica’s Genovese Italian dialect) — state sovereignty resides in a single dominant language. Cavour, the Piemontese Prime Minister who unified Italy in 1860, understood this when he said, “now that we’ve made Italy, we must make the Italians”, and made the Tuscan dialect he didn’t speak Italy’s language of state (he spoke French and Piemontese).
If a dialect is a language without an army and a navy, as the Latvian-born Max Weinreich linguist and historian of Yiddish wrote, it’s clear that sovereign majority peoples with states want their language to dominate the state. French WWI Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau understood this when he asked incredulously about President Wilson’s 14 Points of national self-determination: “so each little language in Europe will get its own state?” For Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia the answer was yes until Stalin and Hitler and the USSR again decided otherwise until 1991.
So the Latvians, occupied and enserfed by Germans, Swedes and Russians for nearly eight centuries, have a language policy that inextricably links sovereignty with Latvian language proficiency. A referendum on granting official status to Russian was defeated in 2012.
领英推荐
If language is a tool of empire, as Antonio de Nebrija, the writer of the first Castilian grammar had told Queen Isabella, in 2012 the empire did not strike back. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t try again seven years later.
In 2019 when the ministry of education decreased the number of schools teaching in Russian, under the pretext that the university entrance exam results of those schools were inadequate, protests like this ensued:
So just as I began to seriously study Latvian, ethnic Russians in Latvia and the Russian government were protesting against:
“Riga’s plans to impose Latvian as the main teaching language in minority schools has created tension among some of its ethnic Russian population, resurrecting a long-running dispute with Latvia’s former Soviet masters. In the Baltic nation where around a quarter of the population are ethnic Russians, only about 40 percent of classes in minority schools are taught in Latvian. In March, however, parliament voted through legislation which will raise that to 80 percent, meaning from September 2019, all core subjects will be taught in Latvian. Latvia says the aim is to improve end-of-high-school exam results — which are crucial for obtaining state-sponsored college tuition…..But the move has been denounced as “discriminatory” by some of Latvia’s Russian minority who have staged months of protests — with Russia’s OSCE (Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe) envoy and even President Vladimir Putin weighing in, citing “human rights” violations. Although such a reform has been on the table for years, it only began to gain traction in 2014 after national ombudsman Juris Jansons said having separate schools looked “like ethnic segregation”. While students from minority schools do figure among the top scorers, all but one of the worst-performing schools are Russian or bilingual, education ministry figures show. “Every child should have an equal opportunity to get the same education,” centrist lawmaker and reform advocate Raivis Dzintars told AFP.” (https://dailytimes.com.pk/257636/in-latvia-school-language-reform-irks-russian-minority/)
This was the context in which I’d asked my b-school students the official language of the USA question. From my schoolteacher sister-in-law I got a bird’s-eye view of how disruptive it was to change students’ language of instruction in the middle of high school. Language for both governments was clearly a tool of power, not education. Sometimes both of the institutional sides of an argument are wrong, to the detriment of the policy’s targets: school kids. Having lived in Barcelona, I’ve been on both sides of this linguistic divide.
Having a Polish mother-in-law who didn’t speak Latvian, I’d learned basic conversational level Russian first (who’s the second most important woman in every man’s marriage?). Some of my teammates in the 60+ basketball league I played in disapproved. But since they didn’t speak English, had no choice but to speak to me in Russian. But now learning Latvian meant a change in cognitive sovereignty, pushing Russian from front to back of mind.
Long vs Short Migration in Language?Learning
Once a native English speaker learns one latin language, migrating to the next one is not hard. It’s mostly a phonetic, not a big migration in grammatical structure. Learning German, with its more distant lexicon and cases, is another matter. A Berliner friend once told me, “life is too short to learn German.” Learning Latvian is German cubed. Even with its Latin and Greek numbers and verb conjugations and loaded with Russian and German borrowings, it’s much more distant from English and latin languages than German. As an inflective language with six cases (conjugations of nouns), Latvian requires much more academic effort than the effortless full immersion learn like a baby direct method I’d deployed to become very or nearly fluent in latin languages.
From the autumn of 2019 to early COVID outbreak I attended in person A1 level classes in Old Riga. The class of 15 had students from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Iran, Syria, Vietnam, Israel, Kazakhstan, China and one other American who’d also married a Latvian.
The teacher was quite good, but did not use direct method, which excludes using students’ native or other languages. She explained grammar in Russian to the Russian speakers and in English to the others. The Chinese and Vietnamese students, coming from tonal languages, were the most challenged by Latvian phonetics and grammar. The Russian speakers had it the easiest. I sat next to a Russian woman engineer who had the disciplined Stakhanovistic work ethic of her Soviet inheritance and an engineer’s structured and methodical mindset.
In learning latin languages, I’d always absorbed grammar indirectly through conversation and then reading newspapers and books. I’d never bothered with absorbing grammar conceptually. This improv approach could work with languages less distant from English, but not with Latvians’ six cases (noun conjugations). Get the noun’s accent or ending wrong and you will be misunderstood. Latvian often replaces prepositions by changing the noun’s ending to change meaning. Six cases times two genders times singular and plural gives each noun 24 possible endings. Then throw in exceptions and dozens of prepositions, each with its own case identity.
I’d always learned languages like a jazz musician; I improvised my way to fluency. Latvian is classical, offering no ready workarounds or off ramps from the academic effort the grammar demands. With COVID this Zoomed process would promised to become even more arduous. After a couple of weeks of conversation-poor online classes with the A2 level course’s very traditionalist teacher, I quit. What next to prepare for the exam?
Fortunately the state language agency’s free courses had a website and coursebooks that gave my next skolotaja (tutor) — my wife Marina— a roadmap. I was lucky she poorly understood what she was in for in taking on her stubborn elderly student who thought he already knew everything about learning languages from learning all those others. What followed over the next 16 months was both humbling and enlightening.
We took long conversational walks on the beach and in the forest, with Marina following the A2 book’s topics: shopping in the supermarket, travel, meeting work colleagues, etc. As a heretofore gifted and academically lazy linguist, I’d always learned grammar indirectly. But Latvian was my first inflective (noun conjugating, case-driven) language. It was like a basketball player being handed the ball on a rugby field. I was repeatedly gang-tackled by grammatical heavyweights.
Autumn 2020 turned to long walks in the snow in Q1 2021, with a looming summer exam date. Marina would hand write topics and questions from the A2 book so I wouldn’t have to decide which of its parts to study or deal with the state language agency’s traditional grammar-centric approach to teaching. Marina’s approach taught to the test. But it coddled her stubborn, elderly husband, who continually complexified replies to simple questions, like a dog constantly pulling on his leash to sniff out and mark new territory. But it meant I could learn a much more difficult language while using my usual method of improv phonetic mimicry.
To pass the test, I had to get taught to the test. Arguments that this is a terrible way to attain fluency in a language would be right. But if one argues with the state’s institutionalized reality, one always loses the argument.
One of our Russian neighbors, a linguist who was fluent in Spanish from studying in Salamanca, had already passed the exam. She gave Marina a written road map, minus one key part: listening comprehension. As always my talents were the reverse of most people: I spoke better than I understood. Having a minimal propensity to listen and slightly impaired hearing didn’t help either. The recorded conversations played during the exam were faster than I was used to and sounded a bit under water to me.
Passing at an A2 level required getting 75%. Fifty percent of the exam was written, salvation for an academic like me. After the exam I was convinced I’d failed by 10–15%. I surprised myself and squeaked by with 77.5%. Schengen Forever, here I come, thanks to Marina Goldena.
State Language Policy’s Unintended Consequences
Latvia’s state language policy is inseparable from the Latvians’ incomplete answer to a larger question: how does a foreigner become Latvian. Nationalities with sovereign states based on a pluralistic idea (the USA, France, Canada, the UK) instead of tribal identity expressed through language, avoid this problem.
Language knowledge becomes a proxy for defining nationality by blood, as in Japan or as in Germany before 2000. In the 21st century EU, defining nationality by blood or ancestry is no longer acceptable. Identity through blood and soil evoke rather unpleasant memories of a blood-soaked 20th century, the final echo of which we saw in Yugoslavia in 1991–95.
Making language learning the vehicle for cultural nationalism drives it into exactly the kind of test-driven grammar-centric top-down centrally planned teaching antithetical to the best learning process. Any sensible linguist knows that teaching foreigners with direct method so they learn the new language like they learned their first as children works better. But that would remove the process from the control of the state’s functionaries whose jobs depend on more traditional teaching methods.