Lithuania

The main legal provisions providing a framework for the use of Lithuanian as the national language are:

• the Lithuanian Constitution (1988, ratified 6 November 1992)
• the Law on the State Language (31 January 1995 no. 779)
• the Law on the Amendment of the Law on the Status of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language (2001)
• the State Language Policy Guidelines 2003/2008
• the Law on Term Bank (2003) and the Methodology of the Term Bank (2 February 2004)

The Lithuanian Constitution declares (Article 14): “Lithuanian shall be the state language”.

• Article 3-3: Consumers shall have the right to obtain correct and thorough information in the state language on the goods sold or services supplied
• Article 5-1: A producer, seller, or service supplier must provide in the state language to consumers the information established in the Civil Code and other legal acts and mark goods in the manner prescribed by legal acts
• Article 5-2: The state language shall be obligatory in all public external and internal inscriptions of trade and service supply premises intended for consumers, including the names of trade and service supply premises
• Article 16-1: 2. The quality guarantee must be in the Lithuanian language

• the teaching of the language
• the preparation and publication of dictionaries, including bilingual and multilingual terminology dictionaries
• the publication of books and CDs for educational purposes and for public use
• the publication of Lithuanian language grammars, monographs and other linguistic volumes
• the promotion of applied linguistic research

The Commission is involved in the standardisation of place-names and in approving legal and technical terms. In 2003 the Commission initiated the creation of an official terminology bank – the Seimas passed the Law on Term Bank. This terminology data bank is based on the French idea: it is searchable online and can provide equivalents of a Lithuanian term in several languages.

The responsibility for the direct execution of the provisions of the Law on the State Language lies with heads of institutions, offices, enterprises, services and organisations (Article 24).

The State Language Inspectorate, whose legal status is defined in the Law on the State Language Inspectorate (18 December 2001), has control over the enforcement and implementation of the Law on the State Language (Article 25). The Self-Government Law states that in the municipalities of Lithuania local government civil servants control the public use and correctness of the state language.

The Law on Citizenship states that citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania may be granted to a person if he meets various conditions, including a duty to pass the examination in the Lithuanian language (Article 12). The Government establishes the procedure of examination in the Lithuanian language (state language) and for issuing the appropriate certificates. Exceptions have been made for persons who are 65 years of age or over, persons who have been registered with 0–55% capacity for work and persons who have reached pensionable age and who have been identified according to the procedure laid down by legal acts as persons with high- or medium-level of special needs; also persons ill with grave chronic mental illnesses.

Their level of competence in the language is evaluated by means of examinations and tests approved by the Teacher Professional Development Centre. The system was based on the European Reference Framework for Languages and distinguishes between school pupils (levels B1 and B2) and adults (levels A2 to B2).

The Ministry for Education has plans to create a single exam for both types of candidate but has not as yet been able to devise a workable strategy for implementing this.

The legal provisions, which refer to the use of minority languages are contained within:

• the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania
• the Law on Education
• the Law on Ethnic Minorities
• the provisions for educating minority nationals (26 January 2002)

Lithuania is the most mono-ethnic of the three Baltic States, with a population, which consists of, according to the 2001 census, Lithuanians (83.45 %), Poles (6.31 %), Russians (3.5 %), Belarussians (1.23 %) and Ukrainians (0.65 %). The geographical concentration of these populations is highest in Vilnius (42 % of minorities) and Klaipėda (29 %).

Article 117 of the Lithuanian Constitution guarantees the availability of an interpreter in judicial proceedings for those who do not speak Lithuanian.

The Law on Ethnic Minorities guarantees the right to free development and respect of every nationality and every language (Article 1) as well as the support of the State in education and the teaching of their culture and language (Article 2). It guarantees their right to a state education in their language all the way from nursery school to the end of secondary education, as well as higher streams of initial training for teaching personnel involved with them. It recognises their right to express themselves publicly in their language in the press and cultural or religious demonstrations. In regions with a high concentration of ethnic minorities, those minorities execute the right to use their language alongside the state language in communication (Article 4) and on signs (Article 5).

The provisions for the education of persons, belonging to national minorities detail the programme for teaching minority languages within the education system and reinforce the correlation between the minority and national languages. Exams in minority schools (166 of the 1,415 schools in Lithuania in 2008–9) take place in the minority language and, if the pupils so wish, also in the national language. 

At the beginning of the academic year 2008–2009, in the territory of the Republic of Lithuania, there were about 166 schools of general education, in which the teaching process was conducted in one or several languages of instruction: 64 general educational establishments with Polish language of instruction, and accordingly, 38 Russian, 8 Belarussian, 1 English and 1 French, where the teaching process was conducted in the minority language of instruction. Moreover, there are 61 general schools where more than one language of instruction is used: 23 general schools with Lithuanian and Russian language of instruction, and alongside – 17 Lithuanian and Polish, 11 Russian and Polish, 8 Lithuanian, Russian and Polish, 2 Lithuanian and English schools. 

Some minorities (Ukrainians, Armenians, Latvians, Estonians, Karaimes, Poles, Russians, Belarussians, Greeks, Ukrainians, Chechens, Jews and Tatars) have established their own Saturday/Sunday schools (around 39). This idea was the brainchild of a 2004 working group led by the Department of National Minorities and Lithuanians Living Abroad under the Government of the Republic of Lithuania.

In parallel, the use of Lithuanian by minority adults has risen from 85% to 94% between 1989 and 2000. The number of people attending Lithuanian as a Second Language courses has also seen a massive increase, which shows the motivation of persons belonging to national minorities integrate themselves into the Lithuanian community.

Although the use of the national language is firmly embedded and guaranteed in Lithuania itself, the Government is becoming more and more concerned about the status that Lithuanian has with those who leave Lithuania, in a context of high immigration (particularly to the United Kingdom).

The main financial support mechanisms are aimed at creating conditions in which a young and qualified population will be encouraged to return to Lithuania:

• a school has been created in Vilnius to welcome and reintegrate Lithuanian students who return from abroad (200 students in 2007). It receives 2 million litai per year from the Ministry of Education

• a free Lithuanian distance learning programme in Lithuanian for college students to help them pass State exams (200 students)
• provision of textbooks in Lithuanian to Lithuanian schools abroad (in 2007, 104,800 litai for 124 schools and around 6,000 pupils)
• a Lithuanian section was created in the European schools at Brussels and Luxembourg in 2004 for the children of Lithuanian personnel working in European institutions
• Lithuanian young people living abroad are now able to take the final exam in the Lithuanian education system
• financial incentives and preferential entry conditions for Lithuanian young people living abroad if they return to Lithuania to complete their higher education (300,000 litai in 2006)
  

Among the mechanisms designed to promote illustration of the Lithuanian language is the recent initiative of the Lithuanian Language Institute – a research institution – to organise a competition designed to awaken the linguistic awareness of young people: “The frontiers of my language are the frontiers of my universe” (plastic arts and poetry).

In 2006, the ‘Profile of Linguistic Policy in Education’ formulated nine recommendations for the teaching of foreign languages. One of those was to encourage the introduction of the first foreign language from the second year; another questioned the wisdom of making the second language compulsory for all up until college.

Since then, a number of educational reform projects have reinforced the status of the first foreign language and weakened that of the second:

1) From Autumn 2008, it will be compulsory to learn a first foreign language from the second year. Parents can choose between English, German and French. Although on the surface this promotes plurilingualism, almost all choose to study English with German and French being unusual choices, which are usually linked to cooperative projects implemented by German and French representatives.

2) From Autumn 2007, a secondary education reform will replace college ‘streams’ (scientific, literary, economic) with a more flexible modular structure which will allow students to choose their studies themselves in part, according to their preferences and the direction they plan to take when they leave school. Officially motivated by a desire to reduce the workload of college students, the reform nonetheless contributes to the decline of the second foreign language (which has already been lost from 26 schools in the pilot scheme, where no student chose a second foreign language). In the context of a highly decentralized education system, those establishments, which are poorest both financially and in numbers of teachers, have already anticipated the application of the reform by reducing the hours of second and third language teachers.

3) As a result of the same reform, the final exam has also been cut back. College students can choose a minimum of three subjects on which to be examined. How well they perform will decide their chances of getting into the universities and faculties of their choice. An orientation document offers sample choices, which systematically do not include a second language, except for those students wishing to specialise in philology.

4) Finally, the fourth stage of the education system, the universities, has begun to implement language offerings, which are in tune with the reforms to secondary education. Some, for example, have made English compulsory as the first foreign language in the first year.

How linguistic policy is perceived by public opinion and citizens. It is fundamental to understand the specific conditions in Lithuania and two another Baltic states – Estonia and Latvia – emerging from a long period of Soviet occupation and russification. The specific situation in those three states relates to the actual reconstitution of national life, identity and languages that were threatened. Lithuanian society seems to be very attached to finding the best way to preserve its language, which is seen as something of a national treasure.Correctness of publicly used language is one of most valuable attitudes of Lithuanian society

According to a recent report on the teaching of Lithuanian in general schools, published in the bi-monthly bulletin of the Ministry for Education and Science (2007), 45% of Lithuanian language teachers think that the most important thing to teach is the correctness of language, while 44% promote the free use of the language in various different social situations.

College students are no different. 45% of them think that it is most important to respect the rules, 35% that it is most important to have personal freedom of expression and 15% that it is most important to be able to use the language creatively and expressively.

85% of adolescents think that the heights of linguistic perfection in Lithuanian are to be found in a Lithuanian language classroom.

The Lithuanian population as a whole gives its preference to language correctness (54.7%), while 30% think that the fluidity of the language is most important and 13% originality and linguistic creativity. Those who support the linguistic rules are most commonly older females while those members of the population who are more relaxed about them and support fluidity of use is most often young people, who say that they are attracted by the idea of the cross-pollination of languages.

Published in 2003, the State Language Policy Guidelines 2003/2008 (approved by the Lithuanian Parliament) makes efforts to instigate a new phase in the usage policy which has been embedded in the national language, taking into account both the European integration process and the strategy to create a society of knowledge.

The Guidelines redefine the principal objectives of a national language policy, which must adapt to the new conditions of political, economic, social and cultural life:

• to take into account the new demands of the information society as created by European integration
• to promote a creative use of the linguistic heritage that fulfils all needs

The State Commission of the Lithuanian Language has initiated a new draft Law on the State Language, which was registered in the Seimas on 24 April 2006. The Commission also has prepared draft Language Policy Guidelines 2009–2013, which should been approved by the Seimas.

In 2006, the definitive version of the ‘Profile of linguistic policy in education’ recommended progressing the early teaching of foreign languages and bilingual teaching projects, pointing out the cognitive benefits that these have on the acquisition of the mother tongue.