On November 30th, Dr. Kadri Koreinik gave a talk entitled “Different paths to revival: Estonian Võro and Seto speakers in focus“ as part of the IAUNRC’s lecture series on minorities in Central Eurasian societies. Dr. Koreinik is an Associate Professor of language sociology at the University of Tartu. She studies methodological issues of language policy and language planning alongside specific questions of non-dominant languages and their varieties in Estonia. Dr. Koreinik spoke from her university office in snowy Tartu to a room full of students and faculty in the IU Estonian program, gathered for a lunch provided by IAUNRC for the occasion, and other participants joining online.
Linguistic minorities in Estonia are often talked about in the context of the Russian-speakers as a legacy of Soviet era immigration. While Dr. Koreinik´s most recent project is also focused on the issues of language and education in Russian-speaking Narva, in the lecture she shared her expertise on the indigenous linguistic minorities.
Dr. Koreinik started with an introduction of the Võro and Seto languages and speakers. These two varieties of South Estonian diverged from a group of early Finnic languages. Although North Estonian dialects laid the foundation for Standard Estonian, Dr. Koreinik demonstrated how written Southern Estonian was part of the legacy literary standard from the 17th century until the early 20th century. Currently, Võro and Seto have around 100,000 speakers in total but their traditional space in southeastern Estonia is changing due to outmigration of speakers. There is an ongoing language shift. In the main part of her talk, Dr. Koreinik tracked Võro and Seto revitalization activism from the late 20th century activism to the present day, showing the different paths of revitalization efforts for the two. In the case of Võro, the status of the language, especially in the realms of media and print publishing, came first, with the challenge of establishing a graphic standard of representation. As a result, an orthography has been approved and a bimonthly newspaper and around 120 books have been published since the 1990s. Now, the Võro movement is introducing cultural traditions (such as campaigning for the inclusion of the smoke sauna in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list) and sometimes inventing them: for example, a joint singing event modeled on Estonian song festivals and a flag.
The neighboring Setos, who reside right on the borderlines with Russia and are Orthodox (Estonians and the Võro are predominantly Lutheran), have been subjected to othering by both the Estonians and the Russians and affected by several border changes throughout history. The two political aims of Seto activism were the restoration of the territorial integrity of their traditional land (belonging to Estonia according to the 1920-1944 borders, but currently split between the Republic of Estonia and the Russian Federation), and maintenance of Seto culture. The Seto cultural symbols and practices are widely known: the silver jewelry, village architecture, holidays and most of all, the polyphonic singing tradition (in UNESCO ICH since 2009). In a trajectory opposite to that of Võro activism, the recent efforts have focused on developing publications and print materials in Seto.
Dr. Koreinik concluded with the observation that neither language nor culture alone are sufficient in the revitalization and maintenance efforts. Corpus planning and status planning for a language must occur simultaneously. Additionally, social demand and role models are needed for intergenerational language transfer and language maintenance to happen. The talk was followed by discussion with the on-site and online audiences.