Languages 3

It seems entirely appropriate that my graduate student Eliza and I read Brian Friel's wonderful play about linguistic colonialism Translations this past week. The play concerns 1830s Ireland and British cartographers coming to rename everything -- in essence, to make Ireland English. What looks innocent enough is actually a military invasion to take over Ireland once and for all.

But the play is really about language and how exactly it defines a culture. Friel is far too subtle to simply say that the Irish language definitively defines the Irish. Of course it doesn't; thanks to the English, Ireland is a predominantly English-speaking nation, and its sense of Irishness is generally intact. But language does embody, if not culture, identity, and that's a huge issue for the Irish, especially the Irish-speaking Irish. That's why the play struck Eliza so close to home.

She comes from a Latvian-speaking family, and she studies at university in a Russian-speaking city. Of course it's not as simple as that -- in fact, it's really complicated. Daugavpils is primarily Russian-speaking, but it's not only Russian-speaking. Most people also speak Latvian and go back and forth between the two effortlessly. But not everybody; some older Russian speakers never learned the language when they came to Latvia, though there are fewer and fewer of such citizens. Some Latvians are adamant about speaking and using Latvian and Latvian only. Most are practical about it; in a country where 40% of the population, give or take, know and use Russian, it makes sense to know and use it as well.

It seems that every generalization I have come across about language in Latvia has been contradicted by another generalization, so it's hard to know where things stand. A little background, first of all: when Latvia declared its independence in the early '90s (1991, I think), it declared that Latvian would be the official language of the country. As a small nation with a small population speaking that language (currently only about 2 million), this move was certainly intended to ensure that Latvian didn't disappear into the larger Russian language that's currently spoken worldwide by about 220 million people, in large part because the Soviet Union was so good at exporting the language into its republics.

That's what happened here. When the Soviet Union started cranking up industrialization in the Baltics in the 1940s and '50s, it moved plenty of ethnic Russians in to work in the factories. This is especially true in Latvia and even more so in Daugavpils. That said, it's worth noting that Daugavpils has been Russian for much longer than Soviet times because the area was part of the Russian Empire. At the turn of the last century, it is estimated that less than 2% of Daugavpils was actually Latvian.

I have heard various estimates about how Russian Daugavpils is -- 50% is the official number, according to the Latvian Institute; 70% to 90% are other figures that I have heard bandied about. Of course, the issue is further complicated by the fact that being ethnically Russian doesn't necessarily mean speaking Russian, though you hear plenty of Russian in Daugavpils. (I am only now sure which language I am hearing on the street, Latvian or Russian, and I still sometimes get it wrong.) In Soviet times, Latvians were understandably resentful that Russian-speaking Soviets had taken over the country in many respects, language being but one of them. Latvian was not taught in schools and had no official standing, a stance typical of the Soviet Union toward its many republics. So when Latvia became a nation again, Latvian became the official language. If you didn't speak and read some Latvian, theoretically you couldn't fully function.

In fact, to get official Latvian citizenship, you had to demonstrate some facility with Latvian. The new government initiated a language test in order to qualify for citizenship. The bar was not set very high; there are officially four levels of competency, "4" being near native fluency, and sub-levels within each level. I think a Russian speaker needed to pass an exam set at one of the "1" levels. (I'm not sure that these are the terms that Latvians use for this, but I think they are the equivalents.) Keep in mind here that many, even most, Russians were not Latvian citizens and that they had been in Latvia for 40 to 50 years. But they weren't exactly Russian any more, either, because they were moved on the premise of being Soviet. And given the economic upheaval in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union they didn't want to return. And they understandably resented being told in no uncertain terms that they were second-class citizens in what was, after all, their homeland. Some (generally older) Russian speakers never bothered to learn Latvian, others flat out refused to, Latvian classes sprang up all over the place for adult learners, and Latvian was made official in all sorts of ways. Regardless what you hear on the street, what you see is Latvian on road signs, street signs, in shopping malls, in all documents, in advertising. Even so, there are Russian-language newspapers, Russian radio and TV advertisements, shop signs, and so on. The disconnect between what you hear and what you see is confusing in a place like Daugavpils: what exactly is the language here?

Latvian also became the language of the educational system, which it generally still is. When you went to school, you learned Latvian, though there are Russian schools now as well. (Daugavpils also has a Polish school; more on that later.) This means that regardless of your mother tongue, if you are under 30, you learned Latvian to the point of fluency. But the language that you learn and know "officially" isn't necessarily the language that you use in your daily life, and Latvian remains, for better or worse, a dual-language country. Actually, the linguistic picture is even more complex than that, but in general I think that statement is pretty accurate.

Granted, many people don't give this a moment's thought. They just go back and forth between the two languages as they need to, with varying levels of fluency. But it does make it tricky to talk about Latvian identity because there are actually a number of them. And for a small country that has spent most of its history under the thumb of every one of its neighboring powers, this is a vexed historical issue -- who are we, exactly? -- in which language is a major, complicated piece of a much larger puzzle.