My country, my language

By E.L. | LONDON

TEACHERS in French schools have to be able to speak French. Those who insist on speaking German may have compulsory training, or in extreme cases lose their jobs. Shock horror. Cue an enraged visit by an international human rights watchdog and a sorrowful piece in the New York Times.

Put like that, it sounds absurd. Yet Estonia's desire to ensure that all school pupils are taught properly in the national language still raises ripples, as in this New York Times story on how inspectors check up on teachers in Russian-language schools to see if they speak proper Estonian.

As a contributor on the Beyond Words blog points out

The Estonian language tests are not exclusive to teachers (As it is, Estonian law requires that an Estonian language test be passed in order to gain citizenship.)—other government employees are required to have a competency in Estonian—but teachers play the main role in the drama. For a country that has been defined and redefined since the 13th century by other countries, it's not surprising that Estonia wants to establish itself as its own political and linguistically defined state. Only time will tell how successful the country will be in imposing its Estonian-only policies, but time is what state employees desperately need in order to gain competency.

Two big points deserve to be made. One is that the Estonian language was in genuine danger of being marginalised during the years of Soviet occupation. The most prestigious parts of higher education were in Russian. Estonian could be used in public life (and in shops) only by mutual consent. Russian-speakers would snap back "speak a human language" when addressed in Estonian. Partly as a result, Estonian national identity is now very language-centred. People who speak accentless Estonian are treated as real locals, regardless of their surname or formal ethnicity. Conversely, those who speak it badly or not at all do worse, and are under-represented in public life and in top jobs (speaking basic Estonian is also a precondition for Soviet-era migrants wanting to gain citizenship). So schools with a mainly Russian ethnic intake are doing their pupils no favours if they don't teach them the best possible Estonian. And one vital part of that is making sure that the teachers themselves speak it properly. If Estonia's bureaucrats were tolerating sub-standard Estonian-language classes, that really would be a scandal.