‘We have a strange destiny’: a conversation with the Livonian poet <PERSON>: Part II · Global Voices
Livonian poet and language activist <PERSON>. Photo used with permission.
This is the second part of an interview I conducted with Livonian poet and translator <PERSON>, who is currently the director of the Livonian Institute, founded in 2018, at the University of Latvia in the capital city Rīga. Read the first part here.
I spoke with <PERSON> about the role of digital technologies in language preservation and his hopes for the survival of this endangered Finnic language. The interview has been edited for style and brevity.
WM: Tell me a little bit about the resources that are currently available online to learn Livonian. There’s the website livones.net, and there are Facebook pages and YouTube pages to teach Livonian – at quite a basic level, I think, mostly?
<PERSON>: A little bit, yes. In coming years that should change quite fast. On the one hand, what we are developing at the institute are research tools for better research into Livonian and better collection of data on Livonian. But on the other hand, we keep in mind that one part of the audience is the Livonian community, and so we try to work in both directions. But they are closely connected, because you can’t teach Livonian without research and you can’t research Livonian without resources. But the idea is really that as a by-product of what we are creating is something for the whole society, in the sense that all these tools can be used sufficiently for learning and keeping the Livonian language and culture – starting from maps in Livonian.
That’s one project that has come out of this place name dictionary. One part of this which is currently being developed is also – not corpora, but collection of texts. That’s also one problem, because corpora are usually just a mass of texts, but if you want to read them separately, you cannot access them, so for us it’s very important also to have all the Livonian texts in one place, so people can use them for whatever purpose they need – just for reading on a Saturday or for creating digital or language material themselves.
WM: I believe that the Tava Klase (Your Class) programme was the first time that Livonian was made available for study at the national level, even if it was only an introductory course. It's interesting that this happened almost by accident, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures. I read that you were given two weeks to create episodes [for online learning], is that right?
<PERSON>: I would say even less. 811
It was a really nice example of how to really exploit this pandemic for the greater good. I received a call from the Ministry of Education, and the person told me “we have this Tava Klase project – distance teaching over the television – and we’ve put Livonian language on the list”. But nobody asked who would do it. Of course we could not leave that unanswered; first of all, to avoid a situation where ministry says “we offered it, and you didn’t take the offer”. So we didn’t want that to be used as an argument [in future].
So we counted seven lessons which we had to make and it became pretty clear that you can't really teach the language in seven 20-minute lessons. It’s impossible. That’s two hours altogether – no language can be learnt in two hours. Then we understood that we had to take a different approach: to offer basic knowledge about Livonian and Livonians in general. And that could be it – that is what could be achieved in this format, just from a calculation of the time.
Then we made the first lesson. We realised that this was something which was going to last […] So was very important that we do it properly, even though we have a time limit and no money. It was difficult, but we had to manage.
This is especially the case with Livonian. If you’re talking about mathematics or Latvian language or English, there are professional teachers who have been teaching full-time. There are long-standing traditions of teaching those subjects in schools, so it’s much easier – although the online format is different; it’s not the same as the school format, which many of the teachers participating in this <PERSON> project didn’t really realise. They kind of took it as “I’ll do the same lesson, just in front of a camera”, which is not really how it works.
We approached it with the principle that we have to make it so that it can be used in years after. 339