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President Ilves: we must persist with the development of Estonian

29.09.2011

“We must keep developing and reforming the Estonian language; it must be a suitable medium for writing poetry, newspapers and scientific articles. We need Estonian expressions to comprehend our surroundings and discuss the changing reality. We can only contribute to substantial discussions if we have exact words to describe new phenomena,” said the President, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, today in Tallinn, at the fifth language forum in the Estonian Academy of Sciences.

Last autumn, the Estonian head of State, together with the Institute of Estonian Language and for the purpose of developing and reforming the Estonian language, invited people to take part in a competition for new words, called Sõnaus, to find suitable Estonian equivalents for 11 different words, which had lacked Estonian versions until then, were expressed using a complicated combination of words or borrowed foreign words or were confused with other words due to their ambiguity. 593 people took part in the competition, suggesting 2,123 new words.

“The competition for new words has certainly reassured us that people speaking and thinking in the Estonian language are concerned and worried about the future of our language. Concern and commitment are actually the pre-requisites for the eternal protection of our language and culture,” said President Ilves in the speech he gave today.

At the language forum, President Ilves admitted that the Estonian language is and will remain a relatively small language that is spoken by approximately one million or 0.015 per cent of the seven billion inhabitants of the world.

“This is not very much, and this will not allow us to take the theories about the disappearance of a nation, language and culture off the table. We also know that the number of people who speak Estonian language as their native language is about to go into decline, at least in the generation to come. And we can never change the fact that one can only rely upon the Estonian language in Estonia,” commented the Estonian Head of State.

According to President Ilves, this is the reason why we must focus on the protection, maintenance and development of the Estonian language with persistence and at national level, while admitting the inevitability of mastering foreign languages to stay in touch with everything happening in the world.

“Those who wish to be well informed about everything that is happening in the global economy, politics or culture, inevitably have to turn to English, German or French. Whether we condemn or commend it, it is still a fact,” President Ilves told. “Foreign language skills are a must for achieving both professional success or in understanding the surrounding world as much as possible.“

According to the Head of State, we must make an effort to create and maintain the Estonian information space: “This is complicated and expensive, which doesn’t mean that we should give up too easily."

 

The fifth language forum will put the major developments and efforts of the last couple of years into perspective, while identifying and analysing the status and problems of today’s Estonian language environment. This time, the main topics are Estonian language in university education and Estonian language in Europe.

The full text of the speech given by President Ilves at the language forum is available from here.

 

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