Estonia Raises Its Pencils to Erase Russian

Estonia Raises Its Pencils to Erase Russian

June 7, 2010

Estonia Raises Its Pencils to Erase Russian

ByCLIFFORD J. LEVY

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.

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. TheNational 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 Internationalhas criticizedits 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 theRussian language’s retreatcould reduce its influence,has protested restrictive language lawsin 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 ofgovernment 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 themto teach 60 percent of subjectsin 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.”