From: tammet@cs.chalmers.se (Tanel Tammet)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet,soc.culture.europe,talk.politics.soviet
Subject: Re: Bilingualism
Date: 31 Dec 92 16:11:43 GMT
Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden

In <1992Dec20.172446.23250@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:

>Tanel Tammet (tammet@cs.chalmers.se) writes:
>>Now my point in rejecting the bilingualism of the Finnish model is that
>>total official bilingualism with Estonian and Russian, so that official
>>documents have to be also filled in Russian, will be considered absolutely
>>unacceptable by over 90% of the Estonian citizens. The need to use Russian
>>in official papers associates directly with the rule of USSR with all the
>>consequences. The existence of independent Estonia and the Estonian culture
>>as a whole associates directly with the language.
..Stuff deleted...
>this emotional stance cannot solely dictate the politics. The
>practical situation at hand is also important. That is a significant
>number of the Estonians, present and future, have Russian as their
>native language.

The emotional stance is of an incredible importance to "practical
situation at hand". One of the first things Estonian politics
should do everything to avoid, is any real hatred and violence
between estonians and russians. So far the situation is OK.
It would be possible (technically) to upset the current
balance, going too far on one (or both) directions.
 
The other problem you have to consider is that it is necessary to
gradually integrate the Russian-speaking population in
Estonian state and politics without creating political time
bombs. Now I claim that total bilingualism (official) would
mean that Russian-speaking population will NEVER learn
Estonian and will stick together as one Russian block. 
The existing separation of Estonian and Russian communities
and politics will gain momentum, in contrast to our
will to integrate these communities.

>But it seems you are over-interpreting things. Bilingualism does not
>mean that you have to fill in the form in Estonian *and* Russian, but
>in one of them. The form itself may appear in two different versions,
>or one with field labels in both languages, whichever is most practical.
>A typical place where the bilingualism would appear are banknotes,
>that would not only say "sata kroon" (pardon my bad Estonian), but
>also "CTO KPOHbI".

>I understand that it may be hard to swallow, but in the long run
>it may be necessary if you want the Russian-speaking population
>to be fully integrated in the Estonian state.

See the previous points. Having Cyrillic letters on Estonian
banknotes and passports will, IMHO, be too hard to swallow.
Any attempts to force that could easily lead to a process
ending with some cataclysm. There are some things like that -
compromise has to be reached around such principal points.
Russian--speakers should be able to avoid using Estonian
in most, but not all, cases.
 
Now, not speaking about INNER politics, accepting Russian as an
official language in Estonia together with Estonian will
most probably have the following consequences:

1) Politicians (and ordinary folks) in Russia will get a new,
very strong reason to consider Estonia as a country where
Russian dominance would be a natural thing to reintroduce - they
even have Russian as one of the official languages, don't they?
Both in a short and long run this will be very dangerous to Estonia.

2) The same goes for the other countries, unfortunately,
who will find it only too easy to associate Estonia with the Russian
empire again - well, they speak Russian and some small local language.

IF you make Russian as a second official language, you will
not get a happy coexistence, but a dominance of Russian with
increasing attacks of Estonians against this dominance, with
counterattacks, etc. Considering foreign politics, this will
seriously simplify reconquering Estonia by Russia. In its
conquests Russia normally acts pragmatically, preferring easy
conquests to hard ones. Considering the good scenario where
Russia does not turn back to its old imperialist manners,
having Russian as one of the official languages in Estonia
might still IMHO hinder reintegration of Estonia to Europe in
the long run (as I am not extremely optimistic about integrating
Russia to Europe), despite few immediate positive effects in
foreign policy. There might be immediate bad effects on economy
also  - for example, if Estonian banknotes were to carry
a few Cyrillic letters, the public perception of Estonian currency
would gain sceptical attitudes, funny as it may seem. The attitudes
of ordinary folks to some currency will mean a lot for the future
of the currency, etc.

Regards,
	Tanel Tammet