State and university tensions in Baltic higher education language policy

2.1 Theoretical perspectives

In a nutshell, agency has been theorised as the capacity of individuals either to bring about change or to continue some practices over time (Liddicoat and Taylor-Leech 2021). Researchers tend to agree that agents do not act in isolation from others, but their individual or communal capacity to act is contextualised in time and space (Liddicoat and Taylor-Leech 2021). In this article, we follow Spolsky’s (2004, 2009) approach to LP studies and consider the essence of LP to lie in the choice between different linguistic possibilities that people have at their disposal. As such, LP can be exercised by anyone. Nevertheless, not everyone has equal capacity to fix or modify language use for others (Zhao 2011, Johnson and Johnson 2015).

More specifically, people either take on a productive or receptive role in LP (Zhao and Baldauf 2012, 5). We conceptualise active LP agents in the terms offered by Zhao and Baldauf (2012) who have listed people with power, people with expertise, people with influence, and people with interest to have a productive agentive capacity in LP. First, people with power include national, regional, and institutional leaders whose LP influence stems from their judicial power; they have the power to make language decisions for other people. In our case, these are politicians, state officials, and university central administrators. Second, people with influence include the social elites, such as scholars and writers, who are influential in society and can affect societal language use either by means of using language in a certain way or expressing their opinion on LP issues.

Third, people with expertise are linguists who are educated to advise on language issues. Finally, people with interest are ordinary people who get involved with LP accidentally, for example, because of their occupations. In our case, these are students and university administrative staff. As the analysis below shows, a person can perform different roles at a time. This division shows that agency is not only an exercise of power, and it unfolds at multiple levels as “policy is co-constructed, negotiated and appropriated by many different players or actors at a variety of LPP levels” (Glasgow and Bouchard 2018, 11).

Furthermore, Zhao and Baldauf (2012) propose that people exercise their active LP agency in five stages (not necessarily in sequence). First, someone must initiate the LP process by recognising that there is a language problem in the status quo (the stage of initiation). Zhao and Baldauf (2012) argue that the key point in making LP happen is to align the identified language problem with political interests: “politicians must believe that the problems are in the need of attention and worth tackling” (p. 8). Then, other agents may get involved consciously (the stage of involvement) or unconsciously (the stage of influence), and some people might disagree and therefore intervene with the process (the stage of intervention). Finally, someone must implement and evaluate the LP (the stage of implementation). We use this division in our analysis below to illuminate the role of different agents in the LP processes under scrutiny.

2.2 The Baltic context

We do not solely focus on the nature of LP agency in the processes of policy creation, interpretation, and appropriation (which has often been found to be multi-layered, e.g. Zhao and Baldauf 2012) but examine the nature of agents together with the standpoints they express. We do this within the framework of the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992), further discussed in the methodology section. As we take both agents and their standpoints to be socio-culturally mediated, we now introduce the context in which our cases are situated.

Brubaker (2011) analyses the Baltic states as nationalising states with reference to the ongoing dominant processes of nationalisation in LP and above. Furthermore, sociolinguists have argued that demarcation, i.e. putting emphasis on one’s own collective national identity and the goals connected to it, such as language maintenance, might be more salient for minority groups (May 2012) and national collectives without strong social institutions such as Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians (Ehala 2018) than for speakers in majority communities with greater economic and cultural power. “Such groups are likely to be more conscious of the need for clear linguistic boundaries in relation to a surrounding dominant language and culture” (May 2012, 137) to maintain their collective identity.

Indeed, language issues are salient in policies and public debates in all the Baltic countries, and maintaining the national language is an important collective goal for communities of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian speakers (Lazdiņa and Marten 2019). These communities are relatively small in numbers: there are approximately 1 million Estonian L1-users (Statistics Estonia 2021), 1.5 million Latvian L1-users (Latvian Language Agency n.a.), and 3 million Lithuanian L1-users (Department of Statistics of LR 2021). Language maintenance efforts in these communities often run in parallel with the discourse of being threatened by dominant languages, mostly Russian, but sometimes also English (Ehala 2018, Lazdiņa and Marten 2019). Although nationalising discourses and policies enjoy high currency, these are sometimes contested, even among state policymakers (Rozenvalde 2022).

In addition to the nationalising efforts that derive from the smallness of the Baltic titular communities, LPs in the Baltic states are being driven by the consequences of the imperial past and the current processes of globalisation. The prime LP focus of post-Soviet Estonia and Latvia has been on reversing the language shift that was an outcome of the large-scale immigration project undertaken by the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, the Soviets relocated a great deal of people, mostly Russian L1-users, from other parts of the empire to the territories of Estonia and Latvia (Hogan-Brun et al. 2009). As a result, the populations underwent significant socio-demographic and sociolinguistic change. Today, Russian L1-users form approximately a third of the populations of Estonia and Latvia (Latvian Language Agency 2019, Statistics Estonia 2021). After the restoration of independence, Estonia and Latvia have focused on raising and securing the status of the national language and teaching it to minorities (Hogan-Brun et al. 2009). Lithuania has the most homogeneous population among the Baltic states with approximately 85% of inhabitants considering themselves Lithuanians (Department of Statistics of LR 2021). However, it still follows protectionist national language and culture policies that have encountered challenges of internationalisation and societal multilingualism (Bulajeva and Hogan-Brun 2014).

What is particular about the Baltic countries is the relationship between the national language and Russian. Here, Russian is not only a language of an immigrant community, but also a former colonial language and the language of the world power. Skutnabb-Kangas (1992) has called Russian a majoritised minority language to draw attention to the uncommon power relations between the Baltic titular nations and the Russian-using minorities. The latter form a territorial continuum that extends outside Russia and into Estonia and Latvia. Although divided by state borders, part of the Russian-users in Estonia and Latvia live in the information space of Russia (Vihalemm et al. 2019). Consequently, the border does not cut them off from Russia in this sense. In the scholarly discourse, nation-states have heavily been criticised as oppressors of multilingualism and minority speakers as the elites are claimed to be interested in maintaining their dominant position and thus upholding unequal power relations (e.g. Shohamy 2006, May 2012). This discourse only considers the unequal majority–minority power relations within the nation-state but does not pay attention to the status of the speakers in the territories adjacent to the state.

Second, the impact of globalisation and the accompanying Englishization on LP is particularly visible in university language management (Bulajeva and Hogan-Brun 2014, Soler and Vihman 2018, Rozenvalde 2022). Higher education institutions in the Baltic states have been strengthening ties with universities abroad and welcoming foreign staff and students. Rapid decreases in the number of local students have accelerated these processes (Kibbermann 2017) that have, as a result, created tensions in terms of language use (Soler and Rozenvalde 2021). So far, research has not been particularly concerned with agency in higher education language management in the Baltic setting, but we bring it to focus as previous studies have hinted that the state is an important player in university language management, and this has created tensions (Rozenvalde 2022; see also below).

The scope of the state LPs differs across the Baltic states, and so does the range of policy recipients. In Estonia and Lithuania, the state LP is aimed at publicly funded higher education institutions, whereas in Latvia, the state has recently tried to extend its LP over private higher education institutions as well (Rozenvalde 2022; see below). As a result, (public) universities in the Baltic states mostly function in the official languages of the states – Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. Among other languages used in universities, English and Russian are the most common. The use of English has increased considerably during the past few years, whereas the use of Russian has been marginalised (Rozenvalde 2018). As Lithuania only hosts a small Russian L1-using minority, Russian is commonly not used in higher education. Although the percentage of Russian L1-users is not considerably larger in Latvia than it is in Estonia, the Russian-using minority in Latvia is demographically more spread across the country than the Russian-using minority in Estonia (Latvian Language Agency 2019). In Estonia, the Russian-using community is more isolated, and Estonian and Russian L1-users live more segregated lives (Ehala and Koreinik 2021). One of the results of these differences is that the use of Russian in academia is a central LP problem for state policymakers in Latvia (Rozenvalde 2022), whereas in the Estonian policy discourse it is rarely problematised (Klaas-Lang and Metslang 2020).

In addition to the policies adopted by the states, some universities have also formulated their own language principles (Soler-Carbonell et al. 2017, Klaas-Lang 2021). In this article, we explore state- and university-authored LPs and their representatives’ standpoints in public debates to understand the multi-layered agency, the plurality, and the legitimisation of positions in higher education language management in the Baltic settings.

4.1 Latvia

In Latvia, the main macro-level piece of legislation in higher education language management is the Law on Higher Education Institutions (1995, LV1^[1]). With this law, the state aims to ensure the use of Latvian in academia, to allow the (limited) use of the other official languages of the EU, and to exclude other languages, such as Russian, from teaching in academia, except for language and culture studies. Specifically, the state requires all universities, regardless of the source of financing (public and private), to use Latvian for specific purposes – medium of instruction, final theses, and communication with the state and society. Limiting the use of other languages for teaching but enabling the (limited) use of the official languages of the EU shows that the state seeks specific international alliance through this policy. Moreover, the state requires academic staff to publish their research in internationally acknowledged journals. This is a policy that covertly pushes the use of English, repeatedly showing that the state wants to align the academia with the Western world.

Similarly univocal is the strategic document Official Language Policy Guidelines 2021–2027 (LV2) that has been drafted and approved by institutions of macro-level agents. In this document, they repeat and elaborate on the policy outlined in the law. The state’s stance for securing the position of Latvian in academia is supported by the argument that “the citizens of Latvia have the right to acquire qualitative higher education in the state language” (p. 7). At the same time, the state stands for the academia being internationally engaged, while the international engagement is openly construed as reachable via English. This is coupled with the acknowledgement that the spread of English in academia can be problematic for the maintenance of Latvian: “the rapid spread of English in a great deal of public spheres in the world and in Latvia, the conviction of the society and individuals that English is necessary (particularly in spheres such as ... science and higher education) ... affects the communication habits of the youth and makes using and acquiring Latvian less attractive” (p. 8).

Furthermore, the macro-level agents, who have drafted and approved of this strategic document, define that the Latvian skills of the minority language users are insufficient. Therefore, they stand for continuing with the legislative reforms aimed at introducing Latvian-dominated education at all levels by limiting Russian-medium instruction. Again, this is supported by the argument of equality, which is to be attained by means of one language: “graduates of all educational institutions must have equal opportunities to continue their studies and find employment” (p. 18). In addition to explaining and furthering the state LP in universities, the document includes references to the largest state-funded universities who are construed as partners in implementing the state LP.

One of these universities, the UL, is the only one that has explicitly formulated its LP. The UL deems itself the national university and the successor of the oldest higher education institution in Latvia. As above, it is unknown who have participated in the drafting process of the Language Policy of the UL (LV3), but it has been approved by meso-level agents. According to this document, the UL has produced it to accomplish the university’s objectives that in LP are “to give priority to the advancement of the skills of Latvian as the state language and English as the internationally recognised language of scientific communication of its staff and students” because it aims to “promote a multicultural environment for studies, research and work at the UL that would guarantee the university and its graduates better collaborative opportunities elsewhere in the world” (p. 1). By defining itself as the university situated in the EU and in Latvia, the UL enforces the state policy.

Other meso-level agents have not engaged in LP explicitly by drafting the language principles, but they have actively intervened when the state policy has limited their institutional LP choices. In a similar vein, disagreements among macro-level agents have become public when new legislative means have been suggested to increase the state’s presence in the language policymaking of universities. As shown below, these agents intervene with the top-down policymaking when they become recipients of the policy and/or when they disagree with the problematising.

One of the widest recent debates on LP in academia was sparked off when the Ministry of Education (macro-level agent(s) with power) published a press release in May 2018 (LV4), in which it announced that the state is going to prohibit Russian-medium studies in private universities to promote Latvian. Then, the Minister of Education proposed amendments to the Law discussed above, and in June 2018 the parliament’s majority accepted the amendments without public parliamentary debates. Approximately one-fifth of the members of Parliament (MPs) voted against the proposal. These were from the political party that seeks to represent the Russian-speaking community. At this point, it became explicit that there were both protagonists and antagonists of this policy among the macro-level agents. Their debate became public when these MPs took the issue to the Constitutional Court (LV5), which has since then become the main venue for public debate, in which macro-, meso-, and micro-level agents have been invited to present their standpoints.

The main difference of opinion in this debate is about the agency in university language management (LV6). On the one hand, there are agents who maintain that the state must implement such a policy. They include several macro-level agents as well as a meso-level agent who the court has invited to participate as a central administrator of a public university with expertise in LP but who has previously held legislative power and been involved in the state’s LP for years. These agents defend their standpoint as follows: first, they argue that Latvian is threatened and needs the state’s help. Second, they claim that university autonomy should be subject to the state’s constitutional values. Third, they suggest that such a policy will improve the Latvian skills of those minority language users who lack sufficient language skills. Fourth, they support their standpoint with the continuation of the long-term reform that aims at establishing Latvian-dominated education system. Finally, this party considers the state’s intervention appropriate because it limits the use of Russian that, to their minds, is a hindrance to societal integration but instead enables universities to use English for teaching, which is linked with high-quality education in their argumentation.

The standpoint that these agents defend and the argumentation that they put forth mirror the position put down in the legislative and strategic documents of the state that were discussed above as the seemingly univocal state policy. Yet, the analysis shows that such a policy is not universally accepted neither at the state level, nor at the university level. In the debate, the antagonists of the state’s active agency in choosing media of instruction for private universities include several macro-level agents as well as meso-level agents; the latter are the recipients of this policy.

They argue for the need to abolish the policy; first, because, to their mind, it restricts university autonomy. Second, they refer to the state’s inability to develop coherent and flexible LPs in universities. At times, they are puzzled about interpreting some of the state’s policies, for example, whether the citizens of Latvia can study in English-medium programmes in local universities, why one piece of legislation stipulates that the language of instruction has to be Latvian, but another gives special rights to some universities to function entirely in English, and why internationalisation has to happen via English, while there are sufficient resources to engage in international processes also via Russian. None of these agents disagrees with the importance of developing Latvian and securing that the residents of Latvia acquire and use it, but all of them diverge from the view that Latvian is threatened by Russian. In Ruiz’s (1984) terms, they construct Russian as a right and a resource, not as a problem. They do not directly address the Russian-as-problem discourse but advocate Russian-as-right and Russian-as-resource points of view.

Although various parties have presented their standpoints and arguments in the court, the difference of opinion about the agency in university language management has not been solved. The court, another macro-level institution with legislative power, decided in June 2020 that the amendments on restricting the media of instruction in private universities are unconstitutional (LV7). Nonetheless, in April 2021, macro-level agents (Ministry of Education, the Parliament’s majority) passed similar amendments, once again forbidding the use of Russian as a medium of instruction in private universities. All this was done quickly and without parliamentary discussions. As a result, one fifth of the parliament that had disapproved of this policy before, took the issue, once again, to the Constitutional Court in December 2021 (LV8), in which the debate will be continued.

To conclude, the macro-level agents who are in majority at the state level are the most powerful agents to initiate LPs in academia as they have legislative power. These agents stand for the strict state policies that mainly support the use of Latvian and English and are against the use of Russian in academia. Certain likely-minded macro-level agents have disproportionate power in higher education language management and the voices of the opponents, both meso- and macro-level agents in this case, are not considered. Here, the meso-level and other macro-level agents do not actively engage in policy initiation but intervene in the policymaking process. It means that they might be powerless to change LP in the initiation stage, but they participate in the LP process by intervening with the process and delaying its implementation.

4.2 Estonia

In comparison to Latvia, the macro-level agents in Estonia use the means of legislation less to shape university LP but are nevertheless important players in higher education language management. In 2019, the Estonian parliament passed the new Higher Education Act (EE1), which is the main macro-level piece of legislation in the field. In this act, the state ensures that the language of instruction in universities is Estonian but allows the use of any other language for instruction as well. Specifically, the state stands for using Estonian as the language of instruction by waiving tuition for all students enrolled in Estonian-medium programmes and requiring universities to provide intensive Estonian language courses for students who are interested in studying in Estonian but whose language skills are insufficient. The state enables universities to offer study programmes in any other language if they consider it important for ensuring high-quality education.

The most important strategic document is the Estonian Language Development Plan 2021–2035 (EE2) that has been drafted and approved by macro-level agents. In this document, these agents stand for the need to centrally strengthen the status and the reputation of the Estonian language, thus highlighting the role of the state in LP. According to this document, such a need follows partly from “the global decline in language diversity” (p. 4) that affects the use of Estonian in some spheres, for example, higher education, which has been undergoing Englishization (p. 5). Building on the discourse of threat, the state takes on a task to ensure the vitality of Estonian and its use as the primary language in every sphere of life. In the field of higher education, the state aims to achieve this goal in cooperation with public universities. Private universities that are few and far between remain outside the scope of state policies and are independent in their language choices.

The state policymakers stand for the cooperation between the state and the public universities, first, by encouraging the universities to draft the language and internationalisation principles together with the state (again emphasising the importance of state agency in LP) that would “ensure the use of Estonian as language of higher education and research, strike a balance between Estonian- and English-medium studies, and help the universities to achieve internationally approved quality” (p. 9). Second, the state agents emphasise that the universities must teach incoming foreign students Estonian, and third, the public universities must guarantee that their language of administration is Estonian.

So far, the UT has been the only one to draft institutional language principles. The Language and Internationalisation Principles of the UT (EE3) were approved by meso-level agents in 2020. The UT is closely connected to the state as the latter has given it a special status – it is the only national university in Estonia by the state’s law. In the Estonian version of these principles, the university defines itself as “the international national university” (para. 1), and as such, it undertakes the task set by the state to “preserve and develop the Estonian language, Estonian-medium education, culture and heritage” (para. 2), but it is also acknowledged in the Principles that the UT shall be an “international community whose teaching, research and development activities are at an internationally excellent level” (para. 3). The principles that apply to preserving and developing Estonian are in harmony with the state’s approach and either repeat it or follow it up. Along the same lines as in the case of the UL, the UT does not construe English as a threat.

Although the analysis of the current legislative and strategic documents drafted by the state agents in Estonia indicates that their primary focus is on supporting the use and teaching of Estonian, and the meso-level agents have mainly agreed to this, the analysis of the public debates shows that macro- and meso-level agents do not always function in harmony. Such debates on language issues in academia have abounded particularly in the media in which a great deal of op-eds and interviews have addressed the topic. For the analysis, we have collected some of the most recent opinion-pieces and longer interviews that cover the financing of Estonian-medium studies.

As in the case of Latvia, the main difference of opinion in this debate is about the agency in university language management. The debate was opened in May 2020 when a meso-level agent (re)started a discussion in the media on the financing of the Estonian-medium studies in public universities (EE4) and publicly recognised a problem in higher education language management. In 2013, the state had reformed the higher education system by waiving tuition for students enrolled in Estonian-medium studies, and now a university rector brought it to public attention that the state had not upheld the promise to allocate sufficient funds for supporting the policy implementation, and the Estonian-medium teaching in academia is threatened. Thus, the main difference of opinion is about acknowledging or neglecting the problem with financing a top-down LP. Throughout the debate, the antagonists of the standpoint remain imagined and are not specified as they are not explicitly present in the discussion.

After the first interview on the topic, other meso- and micro-level agents got involved by joining the public debate and becoming the protagonists of the standpoint that there is a problem with the state requiring universities to teach Estonian-medium programmes for free but not allocating sufficient funding. The protagonists of the standpoint include, first, people with power, i.e. meso-level agents (EE7, EE8, EE10) and a macro-level agent who is simultaneously a professor (EE9); second, people with influence as university professors from various fields announce themselves the protagonists of the standpoint (EE5; EE11); a person with expertise (a linguist; EE6), and a person with interest (a student; EE12). They intervene with the state’s policymaking and try to initiate a different LP: the state should, to their minds, either find funds for implementing the current policy or change the system so that universities could find other sources for financing Estonian-medium studies.

They all use mainly one line of argumentation to support their standpoint, namely, the Estonian-medium higher education is in threat due to the state’s inability to implement its policy, and it is important to preserve Estonian-medium instruction because, first, the maintenance, cohesiveness, and development of society and democracy depend on it. In other words, they use the state’s main LP goal, nationalisation, to support their standpoint. So far, an LP process has been initiated and it has attracted involvement of various policy actors, but these agents have not succeeded in the most important, i.e. aligning the problem with political interest and making the majority of the macro-level agents believe that it is a problem worth tackling.

4.3 Lithuania

As in Estonia and Latvia, the state of Lithuania has adopted its Law on Higher Education and Research (2009, LT1), in which it defines that the medium of instruction in state-funded universities is Lithuanian and sets rules for the right of universities to implement studies in other languages. Programmes can be offered in other languages, which macro-level agents do not define, when these are linked with internationalisation aims (student and staff mobility) as well as for language and culture studies.

The macro-level agents elaborate on their LP in the strategic document The State Language Policy Guidelines for 2018–2022 (LT2a), which has been drafted collaboratively by macro-level agents who hold not only power but also expertise, and micro-level agents, specifically people with expertise in LP, mostly linguists working at universities. The document has been approved by the Parliament. The central focus of these agents is on the preservation and development of Lithuanian that they see to be the task of the top macro-level agents but who, to the minds of the authors, have so far performed the task inadequately. First, they call for making the state LP more coherent when it comes to the quality of Lithuanian, its standardisation and control of its correctness. Second, they ask the macro-level agents to agree upon setting clear boundaries for the use of Lithuanian and English. The main line of argumentation behind this standpoint is the importance of keeping languages apart. For instance, these agents problematise the changes in the use of Lithuanian for science and higher education and construe the spread of English as a threat.

Here, a difference of opinion about agency appears among LP actors. These agents, partly from the universities and partly representing the state, argue for the macro-level agents to take a leading role in LP. They identify the inadequacy of the current state LP as a problem. Although the document initiates change in the state LP, just as in Estonia, the main task of these agents is to convince the politicians’ majority in the importance of the language problem(s) they have highlighted. At the same time, the Guidelines and its implementation plan are highly prescriptive for universities as the authors of these documents construe universities as responsible agents for implementing almost half of the measures initiated by this macro-level policy (LT2b).

The only university to have developed its own official LP is VMU^[2] that was re-established in Kaunas in 1989 by the joint efforts of Lithuanian and diaspora scholars. The drafting of the VMU Language Policy Guidelines (2014, amended in 2018; LT3) was initiated and carried out by micro-level agents who felt a need to have a strategic document embracing all issues regarding language instruction, teaching and learning, and the use of language in academia (Mačianskiene, 2011). VMU, which promotes the artes liberales principles-based study model, construes its role as a university that develops multilingualism, and the Guidelines emphasise that those who re-established VMU “clearly understood the significance of Lithuanian and foreign languages for people in the perspective of their studies, life, and activities. Based on this idea, a special attention has been paid to the teaching of foreign languages [...]” (p. 7). The authors of the VMU Guidelines use two main lines of argumentation to explain their support for multilingualism and the teaching of foreign languages. First, they argue that humanitarian values must be supported in technocratic society, and, second, they construe such a policy as their “response to the accelerating processes of globalization” (p. 7).

Furthermore, the authors stress the coherence of the VMU Guidelines with LP documents of the Lithuanian state and the European institutions. For instance, they particularly stress that “the correct use of Lithuanian language is one of the cherished values of VMU community” (p. 7). As in the case of the university policies discussed above, VMU does not construe English as a threat but a language necessary for university functioning. Furthermore, the VMU Guidelines refer to the European level, not the state level, when arguing for its policy on multilingualism: “The variety of languages is one of the challenges for European integration and dialogue among cultures” (p. 8, original translation), and “the teaching/learning of modern European languages is organized according to the system, defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages” (p. 9). The Guidelines were approved by meso-level agents and currently an amendment is being drafted. It will be discussed and approved in the University Senate in 2023.

By contrast to Estonia and Latvia, topics directly related to higher education language management (such as issues of language of instruction) have not deserved much public attention in Lithuania. What arises from time to time and is related to language use in universities is the debate on the role of the state in LP and the scope of state policies (LT4, LT8, and LT9). Recently, some macro-level agents with power and expertise (people working for the State Lithuanian Language Commission under the auspices of the Parliament) drafted and other macro-level agents with legislative power (MPs from the party Union of the Motherland – Lithuanian Christians-Democrats) proposed amendments to the Constitutional Law on the State Language (LT5). In the amendments of 27 September 2021 (LT6), these macro-level agents proposed to change the law so that the state could regulate the use of Lithuanian in public life even more. A similar draft was registered in the parliament in 2013 but failed to be approved. Now, the proponents of giving the state (or themselves) more power over language use control seek to “regulate the use of state language in public life of the Lithuanian Republic, its management, supervision and control” (art. 1). The drafted law obliges the State Language Commission to set directions for language management, standardisation, and codification, and makes its decisions binding upon all juridical and physical bodies in the LR (art. 17.3). The supervision and monitoring are planned to be performed by the State Language Inspectorate. They support their standpoint with the discourse of threat, as the needs to defend the Lithuanian language from disappearance. The top-down standardisation and control are considered to be the only measures of language and national identity maintenance, preservation, and protection from any influence, especially from the threat of the English language (LT7).

The opponents to this macro-level initiative include people with influence and expertise – (socio)linguists, philosophers, and other micro-level representatives of academia (LT8). In case the amendments are approved in the parliament, they would be the recipients of this policy. These agents are against the policy of increasing control over language use as they see the draft as a means of state-supported language-use control institutions to constitutionally enshrine the necessity of their functions and the existence. They construe this law as an obligation imposed on citizens to use the prescribed norms and as the continuation of the measures used in the Soviet times (to control and punish). The opponents propose to foster natural use and development of the language, accepting its diversity rather than prescriptive use of set norms and control by certain concerned institutions (LT8).

The debate described above is a follow up of the ongoing discussions reflecting the changes in the state language ideology – standardisation and control issue vs natural development of the Lithuanian language. In Lithuania, various macro-level institutions have been established to strictly perform the functions of supervision, relying on the methods of inspection and criticism, insisting on one right version of “correct” language, believing that there is one right version and that borrowing leads to language death; even punishment was issued by the Language Inspectorate for incorrect use of the language in media, books, and public notices. However, the actions on the micro- and meso-level, particularly the initiatives of people with influence and people with expertise have brought the ideas of a more liberal ideology to the rather stagnant policy of the state LP supervisors. According to them, the threat to the state language is artificially constructed (Vaicekauskienė and Šepetys 2016, Vaicekauskienė 2017) by the state language controlling institutions in fear of the diminishing importance of their power and increased refusal to accept autocratic decisions by the society.

The debate is still going on, but its fruits can already be seen in the softened discourse from the strict supervision and punishment for language mistake-driven policy towards a more liberal, recommendation- and consultation-based state language ideology at a macro level. For example, in 2014 the State Language Commission announced the List of Major Language Mistakes (approved in 1997 to stop the inclusion of borrowings and suggest newly created terminology) as invalid. The list still exists but the Language Inspectorate no longer issues penalties for making language mistakes.

All in all, there is no straightforward opposition between the power agents at the macro level and academia representatives at the micro level about many, including language-wise, issues. The relationship between the state and university is based on “pragmatic distance rather than on natural cooperation,” as stated recently by the rector of Vilnius University (LT11).