Transcript Folie 1 - Mercator Research

What is Latgalian?
Political institutions, Civil Society
and Cultural Awareness in their
Continuing Struggle
Heiko F. Marten
Tallinn University
1 Point of Departure
• Conference Title:
– Cultural education and
– Civil society
– How can languages contribute?
• Cultural awareness linked to language
• In other words:
– How do civil society and (cultural) education
BENEFIT from the fact that Latgalian exists?
– How does awareness of a distinct Latgalian identity
depend on Latgalian?
1 Point of Departure
CIVIL SOCIETY
(CULTURAL) EDUCATION
LATGALIAN
?
CULTURAL
AWARENESS
What does that mean
in the case of Latgalian in Latvia?
• In the case of a (still) disputed variety such as
Latgalian, the questions might therefore be
– How much does Latgale as a cultural region DEPEND on
Latgalian?
– How does Latgalian BENEFIT from (cultural) education and from
civil society?
– Where is a PLACE for Latgalian in education?
– Is there any place for Latgalian OUTSIDE civil society?
– How does “Official Latvia” REACT to such demands?
Overview
1 Point of Departure
2 Latgale and Latgalian
3 Recent Societal and Political
Developments
4 Conclusion: Latgalian in the Light of
Cultural Awareness, Civil Society, “Official
Latvia” and Education
2 Latgale and Latgalian
- Latgale – a historical and cultural region
- Latgalian as one of the most important markers of
identity and awareness of “being different” (research
2010)
- Generally more multilingual than the rest of Latvia –
traditionally and today
- Higher percentages of Russian speakers
- As a border region, traditional presence of Polish,
Belarusian, Lithuanian
2 Latgale and Latgalian
- In official terms Latgale only exists as a
region of economic planning and as a
constituency in the Latvian elections
- NO administrative or political unit (only
counties and parishes)
- Let alone any notion of federalism,
autonomy or similar
2 Latgale and Latgalian
2 Latgale and Latgalian: What is Latgalian?
- A Baltic variety related to Latvian, “between” Latvian and Lithuanian
- Several distinct grammatical features
- By far more traditional Baltic and Slavonic lexemes than Latvian, by
far less influence from German
- A separate writing tradition, determined by centuries of separate
political development
- Ethnicity: Most speakers would see themselves as “Latvians of
Latgale”, Latgalian is thereby a sub-ethnicity of Latvianness
- There is a strong awareness of Latgale as a distinct area of culture
and heritage
2 Latgale and Latgalian:
What is Latgalian?
- Recognition as a second written variety of Latvian between
1918-1934 (similar to Bokmål/Nynorsk) on a regional basis
- Suppression of Latgalian started in 1934 (Ulmanis
dictatorship) and continued during the Soviet occupation –
prohibition of printing Latgalian, oral use only in the homes
and the Catholic Church (and in exile)
- Today in many respects comparable to “regional
languages” such as Low German, Scots, Kashubian
- Not always possible to determine the boundary between
Latvian and Latgalian
2 Latgale and Latgalian: Demography
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•
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•
Traditional numbers often quoted speak of 150,000 –
200,000 speakers
Number of inhabitants in Latgale ca. 380,000 (16% of Latvia)
in 2001
Data from the research “Languages in the Eastern Part of
Latvia” (Lazdiņa/ Šuplinska 2009)
Data seems to confirm these estimates regarding the number
of active users
Do you know Latvian/Russian/Latgalian?
100
96,6 98,3
80
69,5
60
Latvian
Russian
Latgalian
40
30,5
20
0
3,4 1,7
Jā
Nē
2 Latgale and Latgalian
• Legal Status:
The Latvian language law:
- Latvian is the State Language
- Livonian is protected as a minority language
- Latgalian as a “historical written variety” of Latvian which
is protected by the state
- All other languages are “foreign languages”
> What does this mean for Latgalian in practice?
2 Latgale and Latgalian
Domain
Situation of Latgalian
Use in private
communication
No restrictions by law; number of speakers declining; Latgalian perceived as a rural variety of older
generations; yet, intergenerational transmission still takes place to differing degrees
General legal status
Mentioned as „a historical written variety of Latvian“ in the State Language Law, without further specification
Administration
No written use; oral use on an ad hoc basis sometimes possible
Court
No written use; official court ruling that documents in Latgalian are considered to be written in a foreign
language and therefore have to be rejected; oral use rare
Police/Prison
No written use; oral use on an ad hoc basis sometimes possible
Health Services
No written use; oral use on an ad hoc basis sometimes possible
Education
No state-organised teaching of Latgalian; some local initiatives outside the regular curriculum; in higher
education Latgalian as part of a few programmes of philology
2 Latgale and Latgalian
Domain
Situation of Latgalian
Economy/Business
No written use; oral use on an ad hoc basis sometimes possible
Culture/Heritage
No restrictions for cultural organisations to use and spread oral and written Latgalian; rich music variety
Media/Arts
Some local/regional media (radio – one local radio station, TV – very little, web sites – increasingly,
newspapers – mostly only individual articles often relating to church issues) in Latgalian, a rather rich literature
(but only a handful of books are published every year), but in total rather little
Religion
Catholic church as a place of survival of Latgalian
International relations
No restrictions to seek international cooperation with other speech communities
Linguistic Landscape
Rare, even in core Latgalian areas
Corpus Planning
Standardised orthography adopted in 2007; otherwise some small-scale private initiatives only
Symbolic Language Use
Sometimes in the names of companies, cafés or similar
Attitudes/Prestige Planning
Some activists’ activities, traditionally low prestige, today on a local level partly with increasing prestige
3 Societal and Political Developments:
Successes for Latgalian since 1991
•
•
•
•
•
•
Latgalian activists after 1991 fought hard for a re-introducing Latgalian to
the cultural and political agenda
Events such as competitions in Latgalian for school children or Latgalian
summer camps
Books
Afternoon classes in Latgalian
Academic programmes which include courses in Latgalian language and
literature, publication of scientific works including the journal “Via Latgalica”
since 2008
Official recognition of Latgalian orthography in 2007 by the State language
centre
3 Societal and Political Developments:
Successes
• Establishment of LatBLUL in 2009 including Latgalian
• Official assignment of the ISO language code (ltg) in
2010
• Lobbying by LatBLUL ensured to include Latgalian in the
2011 national census.
– Original suggestion: „Which language do you use at home?“,
offering only the options Latvian, Russian, Belarusian and others
(please name which),
– Changed to: Do you use Latgalian, subtype of the Latvian
language, on a daily basis?
3 Societal and Political Developments: Setbacks
• Latvian Supreme Court Decision in August 2009 relating to official
documents in Latgalian
• „A document in the Latgalian written language is to be considered a
document in a foreign language“, based on the legal provisions that
all official documents in Latvia have to be in Latvian.
• It thereby became apparent that, in spite of the tolerance of cultural
activism, any political recognition remained out of question.
• As a consequence, the Register of Enterprises ruled in March 2011
the application to include a company which had handed in the
relevant documents in Latgalian to be unlawful.
3 Societal and Political Developments: Setbacks
• Petition by the 2nd scientific conference on Latgalistics (Rēzekne,
October 2009) to recognise Latgalian as a regional official language
• Two letters in response by the government reinforced the tradition of
seeing Latgalian as a dialect of Latvian:
– Ministry of Justice: “Also the ECRML does not provide the possibility
for dialects of official languages to be eligible as regional languages”,
thereby denying Latgalian the status as a regional language.
– Ministry of Education and Science: “Latvian laws do not create the
ground for providing official status to any variety other than Latvian” –
instead of considering that it might be time to create such legal
grounds. The Ministry only referred to the possibility of safeguarding
Latgalian traditions, including the Latgalian language, under the
UNESCO Convention on Non-material Cultural Heritage.
3 Societal and Political Developments: Setbacks
Latgalian is not mentioned at all in the Guidelies of the State
Language Policy for 2005-2014
- Activists demand to „develop a state-financed programme
for maintaining and developing the Latgalian written
language“
- E.g. Dundure calls for a guarantee to study Latgalian at
school, to create an institution responsible for Latgalian and
to finance at least one periodical in Latgalian, in order to
overcome „the Soviet heritage in the educational system
with regard to Latgalian“ (Dundure 2010).
3 Societal and Political Developments:
Government work-group on Latgalian
• Yet, the uproar among Latgalian activists in the aftermath of the
petition led the government to understand that Latgalian has
become an important topic in parts of Latgalian society
• In the light of the general elections in Latvia in September 2010, a
work-group on Latgalian was established in summer 2010.
• So far the work-group has created a list of fields in which policy
steps should be developed. The chapters in this list according to
the suggestion by activists from December 2010 sound promising
and point into the direction of holistic, coherent language planning:
Legal questions, financial questions, education, teaching
materials, communication and mass media.
3 Societal and Political Developments:
Government work-group on Latgalian
Many core issues were taken off the agenda right from the start – most notably
in the section on legal questions.
– Comment on the demand to „render more precisely the status of the Latgalian
language in the Latvian state“: „Since there is no normative document in which
the term „Latgalian language“ is used/explained, it is not necessary to make the
terminology more precise.“
– Comment on the demand to „secure the possibility guaranteed by the state to
use the Latgalian standard language in business communication in the region of
Latgale“: „the state language law regulates that in record keeping the Latvian
language according to its standard norms is used.“
– Comment on the request to ensure that all schools in Latgale have at least one
specialist on Latgalian language, literature and culture: „it is every school
director’s responsibility to decide on the pedagogical staff in their schools“.
– Also demands to establish an institution for the coordination of Latgalian issues
or the right to Latgalian classes at schools were rejected
3 Societal and Political Developments:
Government work-group on Latgalian
• What remained in the list are a few issues which by itself
are worth discussing – but which in no sense respond to
the quest for a more equal state of Latgalian in Latvia.
– Inclusion of language-related aims into the strategic aims of
regional development, the preparation of Latgalian study
programmes and teachers’ training, financial support for
Latgalian media and projects relating to culture and history.
– These aims are vague and create no legally binding framework.
– In addition, the responsibility for reaching these aims is assigned
to educational institutions and activist organisations in Latgale –
many of which are already fulfilling these tasks without being
officially assigned to do so by the government.
3 Societal and Political Developments:
Government work-group on Latgalian
– Statements by some work group members such as „nobody
stops your activism“ reflect that according to the government,
Latgalians should be happy that they can enjoy the freedom of
researching what they wish and of conducting cultural events.
– One of the remaining points in the list refers to „regularly
informing the Ministry of activities with regard to Latgalian“ – a
notion which among activists immediately created memories of
Soviet-times state control.
4 Conclusion:
Political and societal developments
• The steps of the last months and years superficially point to a
more coherent policy by the Latvian state towards Latgalian.
• These have only been possible by regular and continuous
activism.
• The driving force of activism is the awareness that Latgale is
different – even if it is not always clear how to define it
• Yet, the reaction to stronger activists’ demands show that no
serious recognition or language planning which might
safeguard or even promote Latgalian is on the agenda.
• The lack of a clear conceptualisation of what Latgalian is –
language, dialect or second standard – is detrimental to a
clearer policy on Latgalian.
4 Conclusion: Civil Society
• In total, Latgalian is only on the agenda because of coherent efforts by
civil society.
• On the other hand, in a country with a still weak tradition of civil society,
the Latgalian awareness of being different has helped to develop civil
society, to create activists groups, to build a platform on which
discussions take place without being facilitated by the government.
Activism at the same time strengthens cultural awareness.
• Activism reaches clear borders where the use of Latgalian in any official
functions is demanded
• This is in spite of the work-group on Latgalian – which has so far only
given very unsatisfying results
• Thereby, Civil Society and Latgalian support each other in a reciprocal
way. Yet, for the time being, official steps for Latgalian entirely depend on
Civil Society, wheras Civil Society could (in other forms) also exist
without Latgalian
4 Conclusion: (Cultural) Education
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The relationship between Education and Latgalian is much weaker
The influence of Latgalian on (primary and secondary) education is very low –
Latgalian classes are too scarce
The influence of (primary and secondary) education on Latgalian is limited – Latgalian
is still almost entirely a language of the home domain
Cultural education is generally stronger than language classes – as part of regional
studies, Latgalian issues contribute to the curriculum, and at the same time cultural
awareness and the development of a regional identity are supported rather through
cultural/historic classes than through language classes. In total, however, also this
relationship is rather weak
In higher education and scientific research, Latgalian is present as a niche subject
and a unique selling point of researchers from Latgale
The influence of scientists is stronger – there is a regular exchange of opinions and
experience between scientists and activists, which has helped to support Latgalian
also in activism
4 Conclusion
• (Awareness of differences of) Latgalian contributes to
Civil Society
• Civil Society to a much higher degree contributes to the
development of Latgalian
• Education and Latgalian influence each other, but in total
not at a high level. In this, cultural education is stronger
than language education
• Attitudes by “Official Latvia” still determine the difficult
role of Latgalian, whereas anything “official” is hardly
influenced by Latgalian
4 Conclusion
CIVIL SOCIETY
(CULTURAL) EDUCATION
LATGALIAN
CULTURAL
AWARENESS
“OFFICIAL LATVIA”
• Paļdis.
• Tankewol.
• Thank you.
[email protected]