At Country Studies there’s an interesting article on how Estonia recreated itself as an ethnic state in the 1990s:
In Estonia’s fight to regain independence, the overall strategy of asserting the country’s legal continuity as a state clearly had paid off. Yet, in terms of offering a path for the future, this strategy had many complications. One of these was the question of what to do with the 500,000 mostly Russian, Soviet-era immigrants living in Estonia. In 1990 the Congress of Estonia had been the first representative body to lay down the principle that because these people had settled in Estonia under Soviet rule, they were not automatically citizens of the legally restored Estonian state. Rather, under independence they would have to be “naturalized” on the basis of specific language and residency criteria. This position was also argued as a means of better integrating the mostly Russian noncitizen population, the majority of whom did not speak Estonian. In mid-1991, as the independence struggle seemed to languish, the Estonian government, led by Prime Minister Edgar Savisaar, showed signs of readiness to compromise on the citizenship issue in order to gain more local Russian support. However, after the failed August coup and the immediate onset of full independence, the Congress and other radical groups were emboldened to insist on the principle of restricted citizenship. Thus, the Supreme Council decided on November 11, 1991, to require the naturalization of all Soviet-era immigrants to Estonia while automatically renewing the citizenship of all prewar citizens and their descendants. In February 1992, the parliament set naturalization terms, which included a two-year residency requirement, the ability to speak conversational Estonian, and a one-year waiting period after applying.
That’s a bit of an oversimplification. There have been Russians living in Eastern Estonia for most of the last millennium and continuous settlement by Russian “Old Believers” for nearly half that. It was only after the conquest and occupation of the Baltic by the Russian Empire in the 18th century that large numbers of Russians began moving into the Baltic. When Estonia became an independent republic in the chaos of the aftermath of the First World War and Russian revolutions, Russians were about 8% of the population of Estonia. After 1940 when the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic countries, Russians began moving into Estonia again.
The language requirement was no small hurdle. Although Latvian and Lithuanian are not Slavic languages and are about as hard to learn for a Russian as they are for an English speaker, they are at least Indo-European languages. Lithuanian has been said to be more closely related to Sanskrit than it is to Russian. Estonian is an agglutinative Finno-Ugric language and very difficult for native speakers of Russian or English to learn. The Foreign Services Institute rates the difficulty of acquiring it as “significant”, meaning it requires at least a year of intensive full-time study. The only languages that are more difficult are languages like Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. In the cases of Arabic and Chinese their difficulty is due to their orthographies. Mandarin Chinese is actually fairly easy to learn to speak but in order to become truly literate in it you’ve got to learn not only a modern foreign language (Mandarin Chinese) but also Classical Chinese. Similarly with Arabic. It’s not surprising that many native speakers of those languages are only actually partially literate.
Anyway, read the whole thing. I found it interesting. If you like law, sausage, or, apparently, nation-states, you shouldn’t watch them being made.
The part about Chinese caught my eye.
Knowing modern vernacular Chinese is sufficient to read everything written in the last century. Although reading things from a century ago is very colloquial; its like reading a Jane Austen novel. That can be attributed to the immense change in Chinese culture over the last century — people simply speak very differently then 100 years ago.
For everything older before that (basically before the May 4th movement), one needs to know Classical Chinese. But usually the important stuff like the classic Poems, the great Novels, or the Philosophical works of Confucius and Sun Tzu are treated like Shakespeare’s plays or Canterbury tales – books will provide footnotes about the phrase’s or the characters meaning.
The only other time people would encounter a need to know classical Chinese besides a book, is to look at inscriptions in historical buildings / monuments. But then a whole bunch of that was destroyed during the cultural revolution…
Anyway, the point is vernacular Chinese is sufficient to be literate; you aren’t really cut off from the literary history of Classical Chinese anymore then knowing only contemporary English cuts you off from Shakespeare.
Written in the 21st century? Yes. Written before the introduction of the simplified system? Not necessarily at least not without a lot of editorial notes.
When I took Chinese we were taught the old orthography. We also read the classics.
My point about the difficulty of Chinese remains; the main issue is the writing system. Although the sound system is quite difficult for most English speakers the grammar is actually pretty easy. Way back when I devised a standardize grammar for Chinese for machine translation that my teachers said was astonishingly complete.
And Arabic has the same issue. It has a literary language (Classical Arabic—closest to the vernacular spoken by the Saudis).
Fun anecdote. A few months ago I surprised a Chinese colleague of mine by pronouncing his name with the correct tone. He didn’t expect an American to have any idea.
That is very impressive. Tones is usually the hardest thing to pick up in spoken Chinese.
I agree that the writing system is hard; a non-alphabet system means one has to memorize 10000 symbols and knowing the pronunciation doesn’t help.
The simplified vs classical characters is a bit overblown. At first blush it looks like a huge change; but its more like a spelling modernization – there is some order in mapping simplified characters to classical ones and vice versa – and they did not change the meaning of characters. All the works written in classical characters can be reprinted in simplified characters with minimal loss of meaning. My experience is people who grew up with one set of characters can read the other set with a bit of effort, its writing in the set they don’t know that is hard.
Its the gap on works written before 1920 or so that is harder to bridge. It’s like reading Shakespeare, or maybe Latin for Italians.