Estonia’s population continues to shrink. When I first moved to Estonia in 1992, its population stood at an estimated 1.59 million. It has dwindled ever since, dropping first below 1.5 million, then below 1.4 million. It has now officially fallen below the 1.3 million threshold: the country’s estimated population as of July 2009 is 1,299,371. And startlingly, as of 2009, Estonia’s population growth rate of -0.63% places it 230th out of 234 countries in the world. Only Ukraine, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and the Cook Islands are shrinking faster.
And as the country’s population shrinks, Estonia’s young people have increasingly embraced the global onslaught of the English language. So an ongoing source of anxiety to many has been the prospect of the eventual complete disappearance of the Estonian language. But is Estonian really an endangered language?
Many experts grimly forecast the eventual extinction of all languages that, like Estonian, currently have fewer than one million native speakers. University of Washington linguist Frederick Newmeyer agrees with this forecast in its general outlines, but he believes that Estonian will prove to be one of the world’s linguistic survivors.
In remarks made last week at Tartu University, Dr. Newmeyer asserted his view that the Estonian language would prevail because of its status as an internationally recognized official state language. As such, Estonian is widely used in both official and non-official publications and, critically, has an assured indelible presence on the Internet.
But in the long run, none of that will matter unless the population stops shrinking.
A detailed report on Dr. Newmeyer’s remarks can be found here. And the Estonian Language Institute (Eesti Keele Instituut) works tirelessly to promote the use of Estonian (as might be expected, the Institute’s website is exclusively in the Estonian language).
