Not every resident of Estonia needs to master four or five foreign languages, but alongside those who know English, there should be more people who can at least read less widely spoken languages, writes Anna Verschik.
Right now is a time when people are concerned about security — first and foremost in the literal sense (the inviolability of state borders, strengthening defense capabilities), but also in the humanitarian sense (identifying and countering hostile information operations). All of this is undoubtedly necessary, but it does not end there.
I first heard the expression "linguistic security" in the early 1990s in the United States from a linguist. It was not intended as a formal term, but rather as an individual's impressionistic description: do I know the languages that I need to know at this moment in this place, is my language use appropriate to the situation (do I command the necessary registers, do I know how to communicate with a given person) and so on. This kind of description of linguistic security is intuitively understandable, but it can also be discussed more broadly.
I am currently in Ukraine, communicating with colleagues at several universities in Kyiv. Many of them speak about the transition to the Ukrainian language as something critically important. It is entirely clear that for some, this is difficult, as they have an emotional connection to the Russian language, childhood memories and so forth.
At the same time, many people have a command of Ukrainian regardless of their home language and are able to communicate in Ukrainian when needed. In wartime, using Ukrainian is a sign that one belongs.
Of course, an enemy can train spies and saboteurs with the necessary skills or recruit local collaborators, but the point here is rather about the everyday situation. Naturally, in Russia, knowledge or comprehension of Ukrainian is by no means widespread or taken for granted. Local varieties of Russian also differ from those spoken in Russia. A telling story dates back to the spring of 2014 when covert agents appeared in the Donbas region posing as locals "tired of the Ukrainian Nazi regime." One such "local" used the word porebrik (curbstone), which is said to be specific to St. Petersburg; in any case, it is not used in Ukraine where both in Ukrainian and Russian the word bordyur is used. This immediately sparked a wave of memes and the expression za porebrikom now refers to Russia. There were also reports that these so-called locals spoke Russian with a Russian accent.
One might ask what linguistic security means for Estonia. Clearly, our situation and challenges are not comparable to those of Ukraine. First, it is important for us that Estonians speak Estonian in the public sphere, which in no way negates the need to know other languages. Many Estonians, upon hearing an accent or simply assuming someone is a foreigner, switch themselves to English or Russian. This can raise the question: why expect foreigners to learn Estonian if it is not actually necessary? However, I want to emphasize a different point here.
What is critical is knowledge of multiple and varied foreign languages. The usual combinations — "Estonian + Russian + English" or "Estonian + Russian" — are not enough. At one public event attended by several foreigners, the announcer read all the foreign names and surnames according to English pronunciation rules. It was, of course, an embarrassing situation, but beyond that it made it clear to me that a society in which everyone has more or less the same set of foreign languages is vulnerable.
One might respond that there is no money, no teachers, no teaching materials and that there are more urgent needs. Universities are forced to reduce the content of their curricula, even though since the start of Russia's full-scale war there has been discussion about teaching other languages as a second foreign language alongside Russian (to some extent, this has been done before).
Now colleagues in Finland are protesting a decision by the Finnish Ministry of Education to reduce or even end the teaching of Finnish abroad. The decision to voluntarily give up teaching one's own language to foreigners due to low popularity is, to put it mildly, short-sighted. It seems self-evident that teaching a language is a way of introducing a country and its culture, an opportunity to create horizontal connections and to make oneself visible.
There is always too little money. Often, reference is made to the low popularity of languages: if there are no learners, it does not make sense to maintain small groups. There are two responses to this.
First: the market always favors large languages because they are more visible, people want to learn them and publishing in them is less expensive due to larger print runs. Teaching languages with a small user base or those that are less widespread always requires effort. Why do we need visual art, song festivals or poetry, asks market logic, when we could manage without them?
Second: the popularity of a language depends, among other things, on how language instruction is organized and on broader education and cultural policy. The need for language skills can be promoted and explained. What is required is will and vision.
I do not in any way deny the usefulness of English or Russian. I simply want to say that the belief that knowing English allows one to manage everywhere is fundamentally flawed. Language skills also mean the ability to form one's own opinion on a topic without intermediaries, by reading original sources.
We often speak about diversity, including linguistic diversity, but this should not be interpreted as "we have speakers of all kinds of languages here." Rather, it should be understood as diversity in linguistic repertoires. We should certainly also speak about knowledge of Latvian and Lithuanian; Latvians and Lithuanians are our neighbors and, in many ways, share our fate.
Finally, a few words about passive, or receptive, skills.
Language pedagogy understandably sets active skills (speaking and writing) as the ideal. At the same time, passive skills are also useful, especially when there is no opportunity for active study and no environment in which the language is used. Passive language knowledge is not zero knowledge.
The study of receptive skills is not new in linguistics. Based on one foreign language, it is possible to give an idea of related languages — for example, on the basis of Russian, one could teach some degree of comprehension of Ukrainian, Belarusian or Polish; on the basis of German and English, one can introduce another Germanic language.
The ability to understand one related language on the basis of another is transferable: those who have experience with Estonian–Finnish receptive bilingualism can imagine how this would work with other language pairs. Thus, in her recently defended doctoral dissertation, Anna Branets showed that Estonians who know Russian are, to their own surprise, able to understand Ukrainian to some extent when given some guidance.
By this, I do not mean that every resident of Estonia should master four or five foreign languages. Rather, I believe that alongside those who know English, there should be more people who can at least read less widely spoken languages. And these would not be isolated specialists who have to be tracked down at a critical moment because suddenly everyone needs them. This would be a step toward greater societal flexibility and internal resilience.
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Editor: Marcus Turovski