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From Literary Languages to Dialectal Varieties to Microlanguages?: Historical Perspectives on Language Policy Towards South Estonian and Latgalian

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Language Policy Beyond the State

Part of the book series: Language Policy ((LAPO,volume 14))

Abstract

Prior to the emergence of the Estonian and Latvian ethno-linguistic national movements in the second half of the nineteenth century, South Estonian and Latgalian developed as regional written forms in their own right. However, today South Estonian and Latgalian are framed in the Estonian and Latvian Language Laws as regional and historical varieties of standard Estonian and Latvian. This relationship between the historical development of South Estonian and Latgalian as literary languages and their present status as regional or historical varieties roofed under a national standard is an aspect of language policy in Estonia and Latvia that has largely been neglected in literature focusing on the debate surrounding whether they are ‘a language’ or ‘dialect’. The overwhelming focus in the region on language policy towards state languages and Russian has resulted in the situation whereby many assumptions about these regional literary forms have remained unchallenged since the interwar period. By exploring the historical development of ‘a language’ as a process that is socially and politically constituted through alternating patterns of convergence and divergence, this chapter contributes a more nuanced socio-historical dimension to our understanding of language policy towards ‘literary microlanguages’ in the Baltic region.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term South Estonian is employed here in the historical context as a collective term for the written forms that developed on the territory of northern Livland (present-day southern Estonia) up to the middle of the nineteenth century. When speaking about contemporary Estonian language policy, the two spoken ‘varieties’ of Estonian (as categorized by Estonian linguists) that continue to be used in this region – Võro and Seto – will be dealt with separately.

  2. 2.

    This term was coined by Heinz Kloss (1967) from the German ‘Dach’ and ‘überdachung’. The sociolinguistic imagery however masks the cognitive, social, and political processes involved in the creation of the language-dialect taxonomy.

  3. 3.

    For examples of edited volumes taking a regional comparative approach, see K. Ross & P. Vanags (2008) and Ö. Dahl & M. Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2001). I. Jääts (2015, 249; 251) also briefly discusses how South Estonian and Latgalian activists look to each other activities as examples.

  4. 4.

    The inclusion of Samogitian and Lithuanian (see Balode and Holvoet 2001b) and Finnish ‘dialects’ (such as Kven) and Finnish (see Petryk 2014) was beyond the scope of this chapter, however they would be fruitful areas for future comparative research.

  5. 5.

    The concept of a ‘dialect continuum’ can be used to describe sociolinguistic situations prior to the twentieth century where the majority of people stayed near their birthplace. It becomes less useful as an analytical tool thereafter in light of the increasing mobility of peoples.

  6. 6.

    The splitting of official Czechoslovak into Czech and Slovak took place in 1938/39 when Czechoslovakia was federalized and made into Czecho-Slovakia, and then obliterated and replaced with the bilingual (German and Czech) Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and with the monolingual Slovakia with Slovak as its official language. When Czechoslovakia was recreated (without Subcarpathian Ruthenia) in 1945, its official languages were Czech and Slovak, and the Czechoslovak people comprised the two separate nations of Czechs and Slovaks.

  7. 7.

    Kloss began his career as an ethnologist and linguist in the Third Reich and the derogatory undertones of his term ‘Halbsprache’ are evident (Hutton 1999). For this reason, it has not been widely adopted by linguists.

  8. 8.

    It must be noted that this is not always the case. A small number of speakers of a language does not necessarily equate it with societal marginality. ‘Small’ languages such as Maltese (400,000 speakers) and Irish (11,000 everyday speakers) are politically ‘bigger’ than the dialect of Egyptian Arabic spoken by 70 million or Kurdish spoken by 18 million in Turkey.

  9. 9.

    Język łotewski inflant polskich (the Latvian language of Polish Inflanty) or język inflantsko-łotewski (Inflanty-Latvian language). Only in the nineteenth century did it come to be known as język łatgalski (Latgalian).

  10. 10.

    The ban was not applied to the Baltic gubernii of Estland, Livland, and Kurland.

  11. 11.

    A folklorist, theologian and linguist who played an active role in the Estonian national awakening.

  12. 12.

    This coincided with the lifting of the ban on writing Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Latgalian in the Latin script in 1904/1905.

  13. 13.

    For a more detailed account of this period, see Baiba Metuzāle-Kangere (2004).

  14. 14.

    My emphasis.

  15. 15.

    The description of Latgalian in the Language Law stands in marked contrast to the provision for Livonian, which is regarded as a clearly defined Finnic language and not part of the Latvian language:

    The State shall ensure the maintenance, protection and development of the Liv language as the language of the indigenous (autochthon) population. (Valsts valodas likums 1999, §4)

    This is logical (or at least understandable) given that it is perceived as being from a different ‘language family’ and thus does not pose a threat to the unity, and by extension political legitimacy, of standard Latvian.

  16. 16.

    In the 2011 census, a question was included for the first time asking people about their oral ‘use [of] Latgalian, subtype of the Latvian language, on a daily basis’. Thirty two per cent of Latgale’s population (69.7 % of those who identified as ethnically Latvian, and 96.7 % of those who identified their home language to be Latvian) responded that they regularly spoke Latgalian [TSG11–08] (CSB 2011).

  17. 17.

    As referred to in the Convention of the Council of Europe, ‘European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages’ (1992), which both Estonia and Latvia have not signed.

  18. 18.

    As referred to in the name of the now defunct European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL).

  19. 19.

    See I. Jääts (2015) for a more detailed discussion of the South Estonian case.

  20. 20.

    For example, linguists generally identify three varieties of Latgalian: Northern, Central and Southern. Central Latgalian forms the phonetical basis of the modern Latgalian standard, whereas the eighteenth century literary tradition was more closely based on Southern Latgalian. In Estonia, in addition to Võro and Seto, Mulgi, Kihnu, and Kodavere have been codified and elaborated to various extents (Pajusalu 2007).

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  1. Department of History and Civilisation, European University Institute, Florence, Italy

    Catherine Gibson

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  1. Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Maarja Siiner

  2. Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Kadri Koreinik

  3. Educational Studies, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA

    Kara D. Brown

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Gibson, C. (2017). From Literary Languages to Dialectal Varieties to Microlanguages?: Historical Perspectives on Language Policy Towards South Estonian and Latgalian. In: Siiner, M., Koreinik, K., Brown, K. (eds) Language Policy Beyond the State. Language Policy, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52993-6_9

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