As Delfi reports, Latvian State Language Center is to double its efforts to punish use of Russian, to raise fines and to effect a two fold increase in the number of language inspectors deployed in combatting use of Russian language…

May 11, 2007. Declared EU language policy in the common European space is multilingualism, though the Baltics is an apparent exception: As long as the language in question is Russian and its speakers are Russian literally anything goes. In fact no other language was subjected to such vicious intensive discrimination in the past century as is Russia in today’s Latvia and Estonia under careful EU patronage.

As Delfi reports, Latvian State Language Center is to double its efforts to punish use of Russian, to raise fines and to effect a two fold increase in the number of language inspectors deployed in combatting use of Russian language. EU-approved Latvian language law was modeled on Nazi racial purity laws and consist of «linguistic cleansing» concept which is directed against Russian speakers. English and other, in Latvian parlance, «white people» languages are not affected — for example, street and direction signs in Riga, all paid for by EU, can be in English but having a sign in Russian would cause its immediate removal, police prosecution and heavy fines. Even those who use Russian in private workplace no matter how small, are persecuted, prosecuted and fined for speaking in their ownlanguage. Russian government ignores the problem totally as it is concentrated on making declarations and staging elaborate EU summits.

Earlier Peteris Tabuns, the Chairman of Latvia’s Parliamentary Committee on the Citizenship Law Implementation and the deputy from ethno-Nazi political union for the Fatherland and Freedom declared that despite draconian measures, the Latvian language proficiency has actually… decreased in the last few years. Therefore, Peteris Tabuns advocates greater state interference in what language people speak, as well calls for an increase in the amount of fines with corresponding increase in the number of inspectors. The funding for the increase is readily available from EU coffers, with funds being allocated under EU…. multilingualism program.

2007 — Timely Thoughts.