Ineta Dabašinskienė

ABSTRACT

Throughout the Baltics, the issues of ethnic minorities, language attitudes, education, identity have played important roles in the process of social, political and economic transformation. Moreover, language policies were always the prerogative of the state. The recent orientations on inclusiveness, cultural and linguistic diversities and equal opportunities made some changes in policy-making process (Spolsky 2009, Ruiz 1984). In the complex context of linguistic layers (global lingua franca / state language / minority languages) and attempts to articulate language policies we can observe that minorities in this regard tend to be over-represented from a cultural, educational, and linguistic perspective in comparison to a majority group. This presentation offers critical analysis of language policies and practices in culturally and linguistically heterogeneous post-soviet town Visaginas (Lithuania), a very special case of ideologically isolated ‘migrant island’ (Baločkaitė, 2010). The town was built in the 70s, as a home for Soviet workers engaged in the construction of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP). The ethnic composition of the town still reminds the former Soviet Union with 52% of the population being ethnic Russians, Belarusians (9.89%), Poles (9.32%), and Ukrainians (5.16%) as Russian-speakers, and Lithuanians as minority with only 17%. We will discuss ‘bottom-up’ vs. ‘top down’ accounts and will show what is happening in everyday linguistic practices and realities, ranging from ethnolinguistic nationalism, the dominance of Russian, as a post-Soviet heritage, and the post-modern approach of diversity and multilingualism. The hybrid methodological approach is used to exam recent sociolinguistic dynamics.

Keywords

ethnic diversity; language policy; Lithuanian; multilingualism; Russian speakers

References

1. Baločkaitė, R. (2010). Post-Soviet transitions of the planned socialist towns: Visaginas, Lithuania. Studies of transition states and societies (STSS), 2(2), 63–81.

2. Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8(2), 15–34.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08855072.1984.10668464.

3. Spolsky, B. (2009). Language policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511615245