Language Policy, External Political Pressure and Internal Linguistic Change: The Particularity of the Baltic Case

Abstract

Current consideration of language policy issues in the Baltic states lie uncomfortably in the shadow of recent events in Ukraine, and uncertain Russian intentions in the future. In regaining their independence de facto in 1991 the Baltic states deliberately legislated their titular languages as the only official state language, despite having at the time significant monolingual Slav minorities, and despite Russia continually insisting on Russian being given official status since that time. While Baltic writers have often been alert to the pressures that Russia has exerted over the past quarter-century, most Western comment has concerned itself little with external pressure from Russia, but has been concerned with the Baltic states responding to another external pressure: the demand to adopt European norms of minority integration and language policy, in some cases in the form of conditionality requirements for accession to the EU and NATO. These twin external pressures have led to sometimes paradoxical outcomes, as Baltic governments have now accepted and resisted pressure from both East and West. Yet these states have been successful in bringing about a radical change to the previous situation of asymmetrical bilingualism, where local titulars had to know Russian but Russian speakers could remain monolingual. A significant majority of non-titulars in the Baltic now have some facility in the titular languages. Moreover, the Baltic linguistic situation is evolving into a complex multilingual environment where a variety of languages now are gaining salience, the Russian/titular split is no longer the only issue in language policy and new methodologies of studying language practices enable us to look beyond often politicized language policy debates.