Latvia plans to scrap Russian language classes, Lithuania may follow suit.
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If Estonia replaces Russian with Swedish as second language, it can finally into Nordics.
Would be awesome if we had the option to choose between Swedish and Finnish
What about Lithuanian and Latvian?
Personally, yes, I'd like these as well since I really like learning languages. But Latvian and Lithuanian in schools would probably be pretty pointless since there aren't many Latvians or Lithuanians in Estonia and Estonians don't really move to Latvia or Lithuania either. Meanwhile a lot of Estonians move to Finland or Sweden so, generally, these languages are more useful
The more cultural exchange between Finland and Estonia, the better! Estonian should also be taught more here, despite the smaller size we learn so much about both of our languages’ histories by studying each other.
And besides, family is family.
As Latvian I can say that one of Nordic languages will be more useful in practice. We Baltics can communicate in English among themselves
There's like, a combined 5 million people on Earth that speak either of those, I don't think there's any reason to learn them besides "I like them/They sound cool" and certainly noone should be forced to learn one in school.
Finnish is also spoken by around 5 million so...
I've heard that Estonian has a lot of loanwords from German as well. Is that true?
Yes
It's because of the Teutonic knights and the northern crusades.
They, er, had some really intense cultural exchanges.
Here
Compromise, go for Finland Swedish
Imagine being at the high school and having 59 year old students going "Should have chosen Finnish"
Some schools do. Like the oldest one we have, founded in 1631 by the Swedish king Gustav II Adolf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Adolf_Grammar_School
I find it quite cool that the second university founded by Sweden is the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Tartu
Yep. I wish more people would know about these things but us being wiped off the map for half a century due to USSR has made these a bit forgotten.
Swedish would make sense considering they had a swedish minority until WWII
While I can see the sentiment of replacing Russian with it, the usefulness of those students having Swedish instead of being funnelled into something such as German/French etc seems kinda dubious.
Nearly everyone on this side of the Baltic speaks more or less fluent English by the time they graduate anyway.
This. In Finland everyone is obligated to learn it but very few people can speak it. Its a bad joke. We should be able to choose one foreign language in addition to English. I bet the number of swedish speakers wouldnt even go down significantly, because people would voluntarily choose it and be more motivated
As if.
I mean it's a joke but as a swede I've noticed more and more people travelling to the baltics for both business and weekend vacations (especially Riga tbh).
That's what Finland did and it worked for them.
As a Swede, I'd welcome that.
Idk if we need to do that, it is fazing in a fast pace by itself. I understand Latvia's desicion tho. They have more disrespectful Russians that refuse to learn Latvian.
3 decades after the independence, most students still overwhelmingly choose Russian. I cannot call it 'fast'.
There were 26 people in my class. 24 chose Russian and had been learning it for at least 5 years, 2 chose German.
All these years later, 1 person emigrated to Germany, so she's using her German knowledge. Out of 24 kids who chose Russian, I'd be impressed if 3 could hold a 5 minute conversation about the weather in Russian.
Reasons why this happens:
As others mentioned, herd instinct and choosing lessons because of friends.
Russian teachers speak at native Russian level, often having lived in Russia/USSR for many years (no wonder why). German teachers are generally a bit worse.
Parents used to encourage picking Russian both because they themselves are better at it, or because they think it's more useful than German. In the end, what realistic choice can a 12 year old make?
All of my class would openly mock Russian language. The teacher would spew some random BS propaganda about how amazing Sankt Petersburg is, the students would retaliate mocking the drunk villages with no plumbing systems.
I expect the trend to change in the following 10-20 years.
There were 33 students in my class. In 2010, 4 had chosen German (including me), and the entire remaining class selected Russian, getting 2 groups for Russian.
We have been seriously learning it and the Russian groups spent more time singing and dancing.
Few years later: we had made serious progress in German. The students of Russian had not.
Fast forward a decade: people who had learnt German still can speak it and even use it when travelling or studying, or working. Large portion of people who have learnt Russian are not even able to hold a primitive conversation. And since Russian media is mostly toxic propaganda, Russian science output is lower, travelling to Russia is very exotic (however, I have been there too) and it is heavily unlikely to leave Lithuania for work in Russia, many of those who studied it just complain about hundreds/thousands of waisted hours.
What a bullshit argument. Since both of my parents are historians, should I have also studied history in university?
In 2022, there was a slight drop of choosing Russian, however it remains heavily popular. However, a longer-term trend of the decade shows Russian gaining more and more popularity, despite the war in Ukraine.
You misunderstand the effect of parents encouraging to pick Russian. Is it stupid? Yes. Does it have an effect on a child's choice? Yes. Does it happen? Yes.
And it's different from university choices as universities are where all of your subjects would be connected to history as opposed to parents making influence on 1 lesson out of 10+ others that you have anyways.
Also, parents often have an impact on their child's post-school choices as well. If you asked around within the universities, you would find that more law or medicine (to name a few) students have parents who work in the same field compared to IT or history students. The same could be said about parents who work in aggriculture, though it's often for different reasons.
Just because they choose it doesn't mean they wanna or gonna learn it, most people just choose russian because parents want them to and because of herd mentality
Then it is a terrible waste of our taxpayers' money. Usually ones who learn German or French later do not complain of useless of these languages.
Most students who pick a second language don't want to learn it. Heck, most kids don't want to go to school. Are they a waste of our money?
Doesn't help that there are so few choices available. In my school we could pick either Russian or German, and as far as I know, those were the only two languages most schools offered at the time. I wasn't all that interested in German, but I'd never liked the sound of Russian, so I chose German, even though my parents pressured me to pick Russian just because they'd be able to help me with it. The vast majority of my classmates picked Russian because of that reason.
In Denmark we used to be able to choose between German and Russian in high school (gymnasium) but I don't think it's offered anymore. And Russia is no longer needed for businesses. I can't imagine anyone will be doing business with Russia the next 50 years. One place you can learn Russian is in the military, we have quite a few Russian language officers. It is important for the military to have people that can read and understand wtf they are discussing and planning over there.
I don't get why this bullshit reasoning is so popular in Lithuania?
Some of it has to do with our own behaviour – especially in Estonia and Latvia, Russian is widely spoken, so parents and even some students themselves think that "Russian is somewhat necessary in our country", even though in reality it is not (and should not be, considering the official language). There simply hasn't been much thought put into this, so it has casually carried over.
I chose Russian cux my mother told me to, as soon as I was able to, I dropped out of the class and never looked back, useless language, and personally very ugly, and I've never wanted to learn it.. ever.. I wish I went to German instead of being forced into Russian.
It is not, at least not in a fast pace. Most schools have continued to only or primarily offer Russian as the #2 foreign language across Baltics for decades out of a habit, and run on the old fat of there being a lot of teachers available that know Russian.
I come from a small town, even there I got to learn English as a first language. Also, I have not even heard of Lithuanian school teaching Russian as a second language.
3rd language. Second foreign.
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It is right now. However, Russian somehow is damn popular as a second foreign language.
It would've been interesting to see how these numbers change on their own, I'd assume popularity would drop massively in the coming years without any official policy.
In LT, we typically choose the second foreign language in 5/6th grade (no official policy so far):
Last year, 76.5% chose Russian, 15.4% - German and 6.8% - French.
This year, 67.9% chose Russian, 21.6% - German and 8.2% - French.
Not when you have no alternatives available. Most schools tends to offer only Russian out of the habit, some also German and even fewer perhaps also French, but I've never heard a case when Russian has not been an option in a school. In many cases, students don't actually have other languages to choose from. The problem is the stagnated system in schools.
it dropped a little bit this year.
A decade ago, Russian popularity was even heavily increasing.
We can't even attract new generations of teachers how are we suppose to attract that many language teachers that could teach German or French.
Does this mean that even if you want you can't learn Russian?
No, it just won't be the default second foreign language. Going forward, the default second foreign language will be one of the official EU languages, as is the first foreign language (which most often is English). In practise Russian will probably be the third foreign language.
You can learn anything you want, the internet is vast and full of learning resources.
I meant in schools
I don't think such cocky answers help anyone.
At school its gonna be removed, in the future im afraid that european americanized countries r gonna start russianhunting
Do you honestly, honestly think that Eastern Europeans’ distrust toward Russia comes from American influence out of all possible options?
Has it crossed your mind that it’s because they invaded our countries, subjugated our peoples, killed our family members, sent our people to Siberia, settled our lands and are now using those settled Russians as a weapon?
AND regularily threaten us with annihilation?
This has nothing to do with the USA, except that we might have been genocided already if they weren’t a counterweight to Russian fascism.
No country which has been ravaged, pillaged and conquered by Russia needs any outside reason to be suspicious. As the Finnish national poet Eino Leino said [my poor translation]:
For Moscow betrays, has betrayed before; will betray come a thousand years or more.
Don't waste time with him,some people's ideology is a particular mix of fascism and communism and they love Putin.
Wtf does this even mean...
Witch hunts
Eueopean americanized countries? Witch hunt? What are you smoking?
Difference between disliking witches and disliking russia is thst witches aren't real
Lets's teach Lithuanian and Latvian as L3 instead.
In case you use your "let's teach more 'practical' languages" magical card, I'll activate my "most of the students just study the 2nd foreign language because they're forced to and drop it asap" trap card.
Wait, so you're proposing teaching Lithuanian in Latvia and vice versa as a 2nd foreign language?
Great idea to be fair, personally would love to learn Latvian, although it's too late to do that for me on a school level :D
This... This actually is not a stupid idea, i like it.
I wonder how close Latvian and Lithuanian are each others? Could Latvian or Lithuanian read each others language and understand at least something without any formal studies.
Like as a Finn and without any formal studies of Estonian, I could still understand quite a lot of it as a written language when I have some clue about the context. It's little bit hard to explain but it resembles trying to read something written in somekind of Finnish dialect I'm not familiar but I still understand some words even if they are not the same as in Finnish. For example I managed to deduct in that way that Estonian verb "hakkama" means to start, begin, although it doesn't resemble Finnish "alkaa" but is in fact false friend with Finnish "hakata" to hit, beat. I've heard that during the 70's and 80's, generations of Northern Estonians learned Finnish just from the subtitles of American TV-shows they could watch because the range of Finnish broadcast extended to that far. Enough immersion and the need to understand does the trick. While Finns usually don't have that kind of need, it's still rather easy also for Finns to learn Estonian. My family had an Estonian exchange student in the 90's when I have already moved away and I guess my mother learned to speak passable Estonian in that time. It has always felt somewhat wrong, perverse and embarrassing when Finns and Estonians have to use English, when with just a little bit effort (especially from the side of Finns) they could use their own language and still be understood. I could imagine that similar situation with Latvians and Lithuanians will be even worse if the language they have to use is Russian.
Lithuanian and Latvian are very interesting in that regard.
The mutual level of understanding is considered to be slightly lower than Finnish and Estonian for two reasons - different stressing patterns and very little similarity in verbs.
Latvian uses a fixed, first syllable stressing (like Finnish, Estonian and some Germanic languages), while Lithuanian uses a very complicated accentuation system where stress can be different (both in length and place) for each declension and could be located bassically anywhere inside the word (Russian has something like that, however, it doesn't have a pitch accent mixed up in that as well). It asymmetrically skews the balance towards Lithuanian side, as it's very easy to learn our Northern neighbours' stressing systems, while our one is way more complicated.
There is a big chunk of overlapping nouns (or at least we use each other's older/synonymous/slang versions of nouns), however, verbs evolved very differently and we cannot understand each other. In general, Latvian tends to use more Germanic/Finnic/Russian words and expressions, while Lithuanian relies more on indigenous or artificially created words to 'clean' the language from foreign influences, or in rare cases - Polish equivalents.
So it would be relatively easy for me to understand 30-50% of written Latvian without placing any effort to learn, and that would probably be as high as 80-90% if we had to spend learning Latvian for a year at school. It's way more difficult with spoken versions of the language, I currently can't understand much without learning due to different accentuation and high tempo, probably some context, but that could be definitely be fixed with a bit of practise.
This. I'd say that also Finns would benefit for obligatory one year Estonian studies. It's for certain not enough to be fluent in Estonian, but that's not even the purpose. Even with that short time of studies we'd be immensily more capable to understand our Southern neighbours.
indeed
It makes sense. Lithuania and Estonia is our biggest trade partners. Besides Lithuanians are braļukas.
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This is the way
Not really. I understand the sentiment but Lithuania is sort of a multi-ethnic country. This kind of programmed assimilation usually ends badly. Kingdom of Hungary for instance. Hungarians gave 45-50% of the population in 19th century. But due to nationalism, it was widely accepted amongst Hungarians, that other ethnic groups must learn Hungarian, “once they live in Hungary”. A couple decades later ethnic national movements tore the kingdom apart. A 21th century approach should be inclusive, since history taught that homogenous society can not be achieved in peace. The parallel stands very well: the story behind Kingdom of Hungary’s ethnic composition contains devastation by wars, planned immigration to dilute resistance, causing ethnic heterogenity, and spontaneous immigration as well, all these are just like in the Baltic states. And finally if you born Russian in Lithuania, do you must to turn yourself a Lithuanian? Or a Slovak in Hungary must turn him/herself a Hungarian or vice versa? Because in the end the fear of Lithuania is that if they do not address the problem of Russian minority, it will turn into Russian separatism, and then Lithuania will dissolve. I can relate the problem, but the roadmap of this language-driven solution is very clear.
What ended badly was the illegal import of Russians into Soviet-occupied Estonia and Latvia, not what the post-occupation states did to survive.
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Good for them. Will help with making english as second language more popular, seeing how that is a problem for them right now
E: it seems i've mistaken the article's substance regarding "secondary foreign" and "second(foreign)" languages.
Not sure from where are you getting this...
Talking about education - Russian hasn't been "second language" for maybe ever because it was an option as secondary foreign language while the primary foreign language is a choice from official EU languages (usually people will choose English/German/French and it also depends on what teachers are available at your school). Now the Russian language will be removed as an option for the second foreign language. When i was in school years ago English was mandatory while for the secondary foreign language we had the option to either learn German or Russian.
Ah, i misunderstood the term then, thanks for clarification.
I’m a native English speaker and that confused me too. Where I live a “second language” is what they’re calling a “first (foreign) language.”
It is not? Only older people and disrespectful tourists consider Russian our second language, the youth is vastly english-er...
My fault with the wording, see other reply
I don't think it's justified to outright ban teaching Russian. I get it that Latvia wants to simply force a situation where most people do not understand Russian and this in turn simply makes it unviable to live in Latvia speaking only Russian (directed at local Russian-speakers). But then the government should pursue policies that popularizes learning/teaching other languages than Russian (finding teachers, learning material, funding etc), not just ban it altogether.
As a reminder, Latvia has also banned Russian language of instruction in private schools. One should be able to at least use their own resources to study in Russian, even if government decided it is not going to keep such schools.
In my opinion, these steps go too far and unreasonably limit the free choice of Latvian people.
Not a ban. Read the title
Nobody is banning teaching Russian, it simply won't be available as an option for secondary foreign language in schools. There are no barriers if you want to learn it on your own or as your 3rd foreign language.
As for private schools - i am not sure how do you expect somebody who doesn't know Latvian to complete the centralized exams which are in Latvian lol.
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