Estonia Raises Pencil to Erase Russian

[Cees Binkhorst]

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Hoe een klein land groot kan zijn ;)

Groet / Cees

PS. De cijfers: Statistikaamet (ESA) http://www.stat.ee/
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                 http://www.baltictimes.com/

Tallinn Journal
Estonia Raises Pencil to Erase Russian

Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

“It was stressful, emotionally speaking. …Horrible to make a mistake, to
do something incorrect,” said Natalya Shirokova, an English teacher who
had to take a test in Estonian at her school.
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: June 7, 2010

TALLINN, Estonia — Sometime before year’s end, a man with a clipboard
will drop by one of this city’s best schools, the Tallinn Pae Gymnasium,
and the staff will begin to fret. He will saunter from classroom to
classroom, ignoring the children and instead engaging in seemingly
trivial chitchat with many of the teachers, 20 minutes at a time.

“Of course, that is hard to hear,” said Olga Muravyova, a teacher who
failed the test and must take classes.

Tell me, what subjects are your specialties? How long have you worked
here? Can you explain to me a little about how you prepare your lessons?

He will not be particularly interested in what they say. He will care
only about how they say it.

So watch that grammar. The language inspector is coming.

Estonia, a small former Soviet republic on the Baltic Sea, has been
mounting a determined campaign to elevate the status of its native
language and to marginalize Russian, the tongue of its former colonizer.
That has turned public schools like the Pae Gymnasium, where the
children have long been taught in Russian, into linguistic battlegrounds.

Because Pae’s administrators and teachers are state employees, they are
now required to have a certain proficiency in Estonian and to use it in
more classes. The National Language Inspectorate, a government agency
that is not exactly beloved in Russian-speaking pockets of Estonia, is
charged with ensuring that the law is followed.

The language inspectorate has the right to fine or discipline public
employees who do not speak competent Estonian. While the agency has only
18 inspectors, it is such a provocative symbol of the country’s language
regulations that even Amnesty International has criticized its tactics
as heavy-handed.

The Tallinn Pae Gymnasium prides itself on grooming students who can
recite Pushkin as well as any Muscovite, and it places a high value on
the quality of its staff and instruction. So it was a bit humiliating
when, at its most recent Estonian language inspection in December 2008,
about a third of the school’s 60 teachers failed.

At this point, teachers are generally not fired or disciplined for poor
knowledge of Estonian.

Those who failed are already dreading the next visit, which could occur
at any time. “He wrote a report saying that I understood all the
questions, that I answered all the questions, but that I made errors,”
said Olga Muravyova, a biology and geography teacher, laughing nervously
as she recalled her last meeting with the inspector.

“That is actually what he claimed,” Ms. Muravyova said. “Of course, that
is hard to hear.”

After the inspector failed her, he told her to attend Estonian classes,
which she has tried to do. But she is 57, an age when it is not easy to
pick up a new language, let alone one as devilishly complex as Estonian,
which is far different from Russian. (Estonian is closely related to
Finnish, and the two languages are among the very few spoken in Europe
that are not part of the Indo-European family.)

While the examination is mostly a conversation in Estonian, even those
who passed said it was unpleasant.

“In all honestly, it was difficult,” said Natalya Shirokova, an English
teacher. “I was anxious about it before I took it. And during it as
well. It was stressful, emotionally speaking. I think that it was one of
those teacher things. Horrible to make a mistake, to do something
incorrect.”

The tension over the status of Estonian reflects a debate across the
former Soviet Union over the primacy of native languages and the role of
Russian. For hundreds of years, the Soviets and the czars before them
mandated Russian in the lands that they dominated. That helped to unite
disparate peoples and ensure loyalty to a central authority. Yet, local
tongues, including Estonian, were often suppressed.

Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, newly independent former Soviet
republics have tried to bolster national identities by promoting their
languages. Linguistic brush fires have erupted across the former Soviet
space. The Kremlin, aware that the Russian language’s retreat could
reduce its influence, has protested restrictive language laws in its
neighbors, including Estonia.

The issue is particularly contentious in Estonia and nearby Latvia
because those countries generally require fluency in their languages to
obtain citizenship. Ethnic Russians and other Russian speakers who were
in the two countries after independence have as a result sometimes been
unable to become citizens.

In Estonia, 30 percent of the 1.3 million people speak Russian as a
first language, and the government seems bent on employing the schools
to lower that figure. Russian is even more prevalent in Tallinn, the
capital, a legacy of the Soviet era, when many outsiders were resettled
here.

Ilmar Tomusk, director general of the National Language Inspectorate,
said that inspectors tested the Estonian language ability of all sorts
of government workers, from clerks to bus drivers.

“But the most important problem in our whole language policy is the
teachers in the Russian-medium schools,” he said. “The language level of
teachers is lower than what we demand from students.”

He said nearly half of the public schools in Tallinn are
Russian-language, and the government is imposing new rules that require
them to teach 60 percent of subjects in Estonian in the upper grades.
Schools like the Pae Gymnasium — which has 575 students, ages 7 to 19 —
will be essentially transformed from Russian-language to bilingual. But
they cannot comply if teachers speak poor Estonian, he said.

He defended his agency, saying it was caricatured by Russian-speaking
politicians in Estonia and their allies in Moscow.

“There are some myths about our work, about how we discriminate,” he
said. “For a democratic society, it is quite common that public servants
should know the state language. If a public official is in Russia, he
must know the Russian language. If he is in Estonia, he must know
Estonian. There is no discrimination.”

The director of the Pae Gymnasium, Izabella Riitsaar, who is bilingual,
said she had good relations with the inspectors. She said they were
polite, told her when they planned to arrive and permitted her to
observe exams.

“I believe that a person who lives in this country has to speak this
country’s language, even though it can create all kinds of problems,”
Ms. Riitsaar said.

But did she sympathize with her teachers?

“Of course! No one likes taking exams.”

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