Catherine Gibson

The Polish Livonian Legacy in Latgalia: The Confluence of Slavic Ethnolects in the Baltic-Slavic Borderland

Latgalia, the easternmost region of Latvia, today borders Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia. Throughout various points in history, the territory has overlapped to varying degrees with speech communities of Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian, Latgalian), Slavic (Russian, Ruthenian1, Belarusian, Polish, Ukrainian), German(ic) (Low German), Finno-Ugric (Ludza Estonian), Hebrew, Yiddish, and Romani, languages and dialects, and now, increasingly, world languages such as English.2 The territory also functioned as the point of intersection between many different scripts: Cyrillic (both [Old] Cyrillic and Grazhdanka [New Cyrillic]), Latin (both Antiqua and Gothic Blackletter), and Hebrew.

Shading, lines, colors: mapping ethnographic taxonomies of European Russia

This article explores the role of maps in the construction and development of ethnographic taxonomies in the mid-century Russian Empire. A close reading of two ethnographic maps of “European Russia” produced by members of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Petr Keppen (1851) and Aleksander Rittikh (1875), is used to shine a spotlight on the cartographical methods and techniques (lines, shading, color, hatching, legends, text, etc.) employed to depict, construct, and communicate these taxonomies. In doing so, this article draws our attention to how maps impacted visual and spatial thinking about the categories of ethnicity and nationality, and their application to specific contexts and political purposes within the Empire. Through an examination of Keppen’s and Rittikh’s maps, this article addresses the broader question of why cartography came to be regarded as such a powerful medium through which to communicate and consolidate particular visions of an ethnographic landscape.

From literary languages to dialectal varieties to microlanguages? : historical perspectives on language policy towards South Estonian and Latgalian

Prior to the emergence of the Estonian and Latvian ethno-linguistic national movements in the second half of the nineteenth century, South Estonian and Latgalian developed as regional written forms in their own right. However, today South Estonian and Latgalian are framed in the Estonian and Latvian Language Laws as regional and historical varieties of standard Estonian and Latvian. This relationship between the historical development of South Estonian and Latgalian as literary languages and their present status as regional or historical varieties roofed under a national standard is an aspect of language policy in Estonia and Latvia that has largely been neglected in literature focusing on the debate surrounding whether they are ‘a language’ or ‘dialect’. The overwhelming focus in the region on language policy towards state languages and Russian has resulted in the situation whereby many assumptions about these regional literary forms have remained unchallenged since the interwar period. By exploring the historical development of ‘a language’ as a process that is socially and politically constituted through alternating patterns of convergence and divergence, this chapter contributes a more nuanced socio-historical dimension to our understanding of language policy towards ‘literary microlanguages’ in the Baltic region.