Talk on Estonian identity
In December last year, first year BA Politics student Sandra Bernick gave a talk on the role language plays in Estonian national identity, the values of linguistic isolation, and contemporary discourses on identity.
Nadalileht
Sandra asked what role language had played in the construction of Estonian national identity. Until the late nineteenth century, inhabitants of the villages had referred to themselves as maa rahvas, ‘country people’, rather than ‘Estonians’. It was the ruling élite, the Baltic German Estophiles, who had done the ground work for the national movement by bringing Herderian ideas on folk culture to Estonia, researching, documenting and promoting a written language. It was this primacy of language, rather than shared historical experiences, that came to dominate Estonian national identity.
Language was used to connect communities otherwise isolated from each other under different empires. The ‘uniqueness’ of the Estonian language has undoubtedly played a role in contemporary debates over whether Estonians are a Nordic, Finno-Ugric or simply an ‘exceptional’ people. In the discussion that followed, we considered similarities with Hungarian identity, and the search for linguistic anchorage in ‘the little country that could’.