Education reforms introduced since 2018 which aim to increase the use of Latvia's sole official state language – Latvian – cannot be viewed as discrimination against Russian-speakers, the Europea...
  • nekandro@lemmy.mlOP
    206·
    2 months ago

    Increased use of Mandarin, however, obviously infringes of Chinese minority rights.

    Edit: just to be clear, many Chinese dialects have a lower lexical similarity than European languages. The standardization of Mandarin in education has had impacts on these dialects as well.

    • sudneo
      6·
      2 months ago

      What do you mean by “use”? Here the whole debable was about pre-school from what I understand. Russian is still studied as a language in primary school, let alone spoken home etc.

      Also Latvian and Russian are quite different languages, although not so different as for example Estonian and Russian (where BTW similar measures in educations have been passed).

    • Mobilityfuture@lemmy.world
      117·
      2 months ago

      Correct.

      In Latvia the reason they are even having this discussion is because when USSR were occupiers they suppressed the local language (Latvian) with a brutal police regime, concentration camps, and the forced migration of ethnic Russians.

      So yes - exactly. Moscovite Russia/ USSR started a cultural genocide in Latvia. This is just the fallout

    • tychosmoose
      2·
      2 months ago

      The cultural genocide was by Russia, from Alexander III to Stalin and beyond. It involved enforcing the use of Russian to the exclusion of Latvian, removing the requirement for learning both languages in school, and also the mass deportation of Latvian cultural and political figures to the Soviet far east to weaken Latvian culture.

      Each of the Baltic states faced this to differing degrees, and each has approached it differently since 1989. Latvia has been the least aggressive of the 3 in mandating the teaching and use of Latvian since then.

    • riodoro1@lemmy.world
      612·
      2 months ago

      Well, they build camps and aim rifles at people they’re “educating” so maybe that’s why?

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
        95·
        2 months ago

        Compare how many Tibetans speak Tibetan with how many natives in US speak their languages (or Welsh, Irish, Scots, Bretonians, Sorbians etc etc etc wherever applicable) before you start to run your western supremacist nonsense.