Some complained that it ignored Latgalian, which has a 300-year-old literary tradition in its heartland in eastern Latvia but is officially considered a "dialect."
But as the conference drew to a close on April 21, Robert Phillipson of Denmark's Copenhagen Business School said it was a "marvelous beginning" for a Europe, which lacks any forum for addressing language issues.
Particularly on Phillipson's mind was the subjugation of small languages by English. Earlier, his wife, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, of Roskilde University, also in Denmark, warned that 90 percent of the languages currently spoken in the world may be dead by the end of the century. "Formal education and media are the main culprits," she said.
Her fighting talk came as a respite for many. The morning was dominated by Latvian politicians, who, for the most part, hailed their country's language policies - despite indications that Latvia still has work to do in this sphere if it is to satisfy the Council of Europe's human rights body, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Leonid Raihman, a minority rights campaigner, said the conference would have benefited from including a greater range of opinion from Latvia. "Latvia's non-citizens are also interested in what is meant by small languages," he said.
By lunch several participants were privately voicing the same opinion. Dinner was at the Lido leisure center, a venue where delegates could get a feel for the real Latvia, according to Foreign Minister Indulis Berzins. As an illuminated windmill rotated outside and an electronic elk nodded inside, Anna Antonowicz, a doctoral student from the Catholic University in Lublin, Poland, gave her verdict on the event.
"The speeches were devastatingly boring, monotonous and repetitive," she said. "A conference isn't only about selling ideas. Ideas only change when there is a clash. The message I got was that we in Europe are all doing a great job, which isn't true."
Alongside contributions from as far afield as Cyprus, Ireland and Armenia, some of the Baltic states' marginalized languages did get a look in.
Anna Verschik from Tartu University in Estonia talked about efforts to revive Yiddish, which, until the Holocaust, was a medium of education in all three Baltic states. Vilnius, as a capital of Jewish culture, once boasted eight daily Yiddish newspapers, she said.
"The bastions of Yiddish were destroyed by the Holocaust and Soviet rule. The Yiddish legacy is part of European history."
Liv, spoken by as few as 20 people from Kurzeme, on the Latvian western coast, did make it onto the agenda, with a short talk by MP Ilmars Geige.
But Latgalian was missing - to the surprise of Anna Stafecka, doctor of philology at Latvia University's Latvian Language Institute. "We suggested something on Latgalian, but the organizers were not interested," she said.
Ina Druviete, a linguist and conference adviser, told The Baltic Times that Latgalian is not a language. Rather, it is a "standard form of a Latvian dialect," meaning that it cannot be used for official purposes.
But Jurs Cybuls (Juris Cibuls in Latvian) disagrees. Writer of a textbook which, he says, "sold like hot cakes" when it came out in 1992, was not invited to the conference. "Latgalian should at least have been mentioned," he said.
Latgalian, spoken by 150,000 to 200,000 speakers, is a separate language, says Cybuls, and should have official status in Latgale. Pulling out a textbook he pointed out that some of the simplest words bear no resemblance to their Latvian counterparts.
"If a Latvian and a Latgalian want to speak about agriculture, plants and animals in their own languages they wouldn't understand each other. My mother has trouble filling in forms in Latvian. Of course Latgalian has words borrowed from Slavic languages, but people forget that Latvian is also not pure. It borrows from English."
Short of a separate state, Cybuls would like Latgale to have its own banknotes, street signs and stamps. "I don't feel like a Latvian," he says. "Latvian as a nationality only appeared in the 19th century and the word 'Latvian' does not exist in our language. Latgalian words for rivers and lakes disappeared at the time of the interwar Latvian Republic. I would like my name to be written in my passport using Latgalian spelling, but it's forbidden."
But despite a lack of support by the state, Latgalian is not about to disappear, says Cybuls. "All Latgalian schools were closed in 1939 and books were burned. Even now there are no schools where Latgalian is the (main) language of instruction. But Latgalian is not dying. Parents teach it at home, though they don't know how to write it. Very few people forget the language."
Whether speakers of other small languages in the former Soviet Union are so optimistic is doubtful. Mark Diachkov of Moscow State University told delegates at the conference that the outlook is bleak for the languages of the 172 ethnic groups that identified themselves in a recent survey of the Russian Federation. The "democratic euphoria" that informed the drawing up of the 1991 Act on the Languages of Russia has turned out to be a "delusion," he said.
He added that the act, which enshrined the principal of linguistic sovereignty, has since been watered down, and the Russian-speaking majority has been unwilling to accept the equal rights of other languages.
Russia has promised to sign and ratify the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages, but few ethnic groups know of the document's existence. "The signature could be nothing but a nominal act," said Diachkov.
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