The Languages of Smaller Populations: Risks and Possibilities. Lectures from the Tallinn Conference, 16–17 March 2012. Urmas Bereczki

      Whether we realise it or not, the topic of today’s conference calls to mind the existentiality of language. This is a thought to be reflected on unhurriedly, without creating illusions or falling into despondency.

      Relationships between a state and its people can be diverse. The population of some countries, such as Iceland, is homogeneous – the overwhelming majority of people are of the same ethnicity and their mother tongue enjoys the status of the national language. There are multi-ethnic countries with several official languages, such as Switzerland and Finland. There are peoples divided between different countries, such as the Basques in Spain and France or the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq. There are also regions where one ethnic group is cut in two by a political border, such as today’s Korea and the once-divided Germany.

      Most countries of the world are home to multiple ethnicities; in such countries, the language of one ethnic group enjoys the status of an official language, while the languages of other ethnic groups are used to a different extent and for different functions. Whatever the official status of these other languages, the need to have a commonly understood medium of communication, which is crucial for the proper functioning of a state, inevitably leads to the exclusion of other languages. One such country is, for example, Russia where Finno-Ugric languages enjoy the status of official languages but the opportunities to actually use them (e.g. in education, in government offices, in everyday business or health care) are very scarce, limited to village communities and virtually non-existent in cities.

      Estonia, having Estonian as the only official language, is also one of the countries in that group. The best way to preserve the language of a small nation is a nation state with only one official language; after all, one purpose, perhaps the primary purpose, of a nation state is to ensure the survival of the language of its people.

      In today’s world, characterised by globalisation and the mobility of people, there are no clean-cut types of relationship between the state and the people: all countries are becoming linguistically more diverse and even those languages that have an official status relinquish part of their functions to more widely used languages, e.g. to English, which is the case in Estonia.

      How the current linguistic situation was formed in the past is not, from the point of view of the future of languages, the most important aspect. Romantic recollections of the great deeds of the past are not much of a defence against the reality. What is more important is how the government will address language policy issues and what level the language (I am referring, in particular, to terminology) and its usage have reached (Estonian reached an appreciable level by the end of the 1930s).

      Because a certain number of people are required to cover all domains necessary for the functioning of a state, languages with a larger number of speakers have better outlooks, for both economic and political reasons. In order to compensate for the numerical disproportion of speakers, the state has to support the languages of small nations, while big languages evolve simply by satisfying the requirements of the market.

      The state has to ensure a legal space for the language, i.e. to define the status of the language. Section 6 of the Constitution of the Republic of Estonia provides unequivocally: “The official language of Estonia is Estonian”. It is welcomed that the provision has been reinforced by the preamble of the Constitution, which states that one of the primary duties of the state is to guarantee the preservation of the Estonian language through the ages. Recent statements calling for political discussions on the number of official languages are proof that such a declaration may come in handy. Drawing on the Constitution, the Language Act defines the duties of the state in ensuring the use and development of Estonian. The Language Act, in turn, underpins dozens of pieces of legislation adopted to enforce the status of Estonian.

      The role of the state has been kept proportionate: while the use and development of Estonian is endorsed, the use and development of other languages, within reasonable and economically realistic limits, is not prevented. Not all problems are easy to solve with regard to Estonian either; it is, for example, difficult to improve the quality of the language of the press without coming into conflict with freedom of speech, which is taken for granted.

      State supervision over certain aspects of public life as a part of ensuring the legal space is carried out by the Language Inspectorate. The state must ensure the advancement of and research into Estonian through the Institute of the Estonian Language, the Estonian Literary Museum and Estonian universities; the State has an obligation to record, preserve and promote the cultural heritage related to the Estonian language. An excellent example is the permanent exhibition on Estonian language and culture at the Estonian National Museum.

      A language in use is a language that meets the requirements of today and tomorrow. Similar to Nordic countries, Estonia has adopted a national development plan for the Estonian language (the first development plan concerned the period between 2004 and 2010; the current was adopted for 2011–2017). The 13 actions under the current development plan cover virtually all areas of Estonian usage along with calculations of costs to be covered from the state budget. A development plan in itself is not the answer; what is crucial is the implementation of the plan. The implementation should be ensured with constant monitoring by the Ministry of Education and the Estonian Language Council, by regular reporting to the Government of the Republic on the language situation and by discussing language matters in Parliament as an issue of national importance.

      Among the actions of the development plan, I would like to highlight Action 3: “The development of language technology support for Estonian”. A language technology that focuses on our own language is one of the most important prerequisites for preserving our language, similar to the introduction of printing technology several hundred years ago. Estonia already has a second language technology programme under which language resources are created and software is developed. The future benefits of the programme, albeit smaller than the cost, will contribute to the survival of our mother tongue. The state’s duty is to cover the difference between the cost and the benefits. It is worth mentioning that the current and previous ministers for education and research nominated “Speech recognition applications for smartphones” as the language act of the year in 2011.

      The key factor in ensuring the development of language is education. Teaching colloquial language for a few hours a week at school or university is not enough to preserve a language. An important condition for the survival of a language is the provision of secondary and higher education in that language, enabling school leavers and graduates to form a national intelligentsia who are able to develop the national literary language further. General and higher education are a two-horse team hitched up to the wagon of language preservation. Naturally, a language will not immediately cease to exist if there is no generally used, standardised literary language, but its prospects would look grim.

      Higher education in Estonian is not possible without secondary education in Estonian. Without the prospect of obtaining tertiary