Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
You definitely score 10/10 on the patriotism scale, nulle. They should give you a medal for joining a Russian forum and sticking to your guns for as long as you have, (even if I think I have said everything I have to say about this matter, about 5 times in this thread).

If all Latvians were like you, you would never have been in the USSR in the first place.
You can get "free" citizenship for special services to the nation. Nulle's trolldom might count...

Anyway, Hanna's position on this question - no question about the need for Latvian localization, and no question about the wrong-headedness of the current policies towards the Russian-speaking minority - is absolutely correct and wouldn't be questioned by anyone with any understanding of the National Question in general, language planning policy theory, nation-building, language acquisition, civic rights or plain old democracy.

A good presentation of the situation in Latvia can be found in this article (pdf, quick view): https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...tdt9hJYNn2A16g

or direct for download here: sh.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:128103/FULLTEXT01

One thing that is clear from this (and this expression will be mine, not the author's) is that official Latvian language acquisition policy towards Russian-speakers is like teaching someone a language by writing some words on a baseball bat and smashing it into the learner's mouth.

I've just returned from a three-four day trip to Riga. I'm very interested in languages and was hoping to find some good materials for learning the language and something about it. Especially I hoped to find some hot-shit learning materials in Russian. The Soviet legacy in language teaching is excellent - I've seen this clearly myself in relation to textbooks in Hungarian and Czech from the days of the Stalinist occupation. I found nothing. A couple of short, not very clearly thought out textbooks for English speakers. I was extremely disappointed. I knew the Latvian majority practises discrimination against the Russian-speaking population, but the extent of this discrimination horrified me. Vindictive doesn't begin to cover it. I'm still interested in the language for linguistic reasons, but from now on I study with a clothes-peg on my nose.

It was fascinating to see what a miserable place Riga was - as far as the faces and demeanour of the people were concerned. But I suppose if you've been enjoying the benefits of capitalist freedom and democracy for twenty years and feel totally betrayed in every respect you've got every right to look miserable. People aren't even this glum in Helsinki a bad week in November.

The thing that best sums it all up for me is that the State Language Centre is part of the Ministry of Justice, and has policing and punitive powers. State Language Inspectors spying on and harassing members of a national minority going about their daily business. 1984. (A book I almost bought in Latvian to practise reading using a familiar text, and regretted not buying from the moment I left the bookshop. I couldn't find the Master and Margarita in Latvian, but given the state of affairs in the country 1984 would have been more appropriate...)

Thanks for listening. Paldies. Спасибо!