Latvian CDI: methodology,developmental trends,and cross-linguistic comparison

ABSTRACT

In this article, we report the results of a large-scale population study based on the Latvian adaptation of Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) – a parental report tool aimed at mapping the lexical and grammatical development of children under the age of three. Two CDI forms are discussed: CDI I: ‘Words and Gestures’ (8–16 months), and CDI II: ‘Words and Sentences’ (17–36 months). This article discusses the Internet-based methodology used for the data collection, reports the main developmental trends of the lexical development of Latvian children, and compares these trends to analogous data from American English, Norwegian, and Russian.     

Orientalism,otherness, and the Soviet empire: travelogues by Latvian writers of the Soviet period

ABSTRACT

The development of travel writing in a national literature is closely related to the geographical and mental cartography that characterizes that territory. This article investigates Latvian travelogues of the Soviet era as encounters with other nations within the Soviet empire in order to analyze the role of Latvian travel writings in shaping a feeling of belonging to the empire. In addition to fostering obedience and a sense of belonging to the Soviet empire during the first 15 oppressive years of the Soviet regime, Latvian travelogues of the later years represented the Soviet empire as a conflictual site of the destruction of traditional values and landscapes.     

‘The Secret Nazi Network’ and Post-World War II Latvian Émigrés in the United States

This study of post-World War II political refugees from Latvia in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s uses data from American and Latvian periodicals, printed materials and archival records to uncover the complexities in small immigrant groups’ collective memory, political position and relations with the dominant group. When a number of Latvians were accused by the Office of Special Investigations of having lied on their immigration forms about their collaboration with the Nazis, this story gained political undertones and propelled the émigré community into an intra-group debate over its history and public image.     

A new faith and a new name? Crusades,conversion, and baptismal names in medieval Baltics

The baptism of the natives in Estonia and Latvia in the thirteenth century did not result in compulsory name change. The native population accepted the “Christian” names by the mid-sixteenth century as a result of general cultural adaption of elements of the “German” culture of socially higher classes, but this process does not directly reflect the process of acceptance of the Christian religion. The few examples of receiving a new name in the crusading period indicate the re-arrangement of political relations, which were related to creating patronage ties and god-parenthood relations.     

Evicting the Speaking Subject: A Critique of Latvian Concepts of Language

This paper highlights some peculiarities of the nation–language conflation in Latvian linguistics and traces their evolution. Treating language as the perfect structure consolidating ideal speakers, linguists perceive native speakers as a homogenous community whose task is to reproduce the normative language structure. Speaking subjects are denied social agency, and divergence from the norm in communication is treated as an error. The paper argues that empirically observed language use can be explained by taking into account the pragmatic intentions of speaking subjects.     

Memory-Theater As Cultural Generativity: Eslingena: A Musical In Toronto And Riga

Linking the concept of generativity to expressive culture as a communicative resource, this article asks how recontextualization shifts meanings. I focus on the reception by audiences in Toronto and Riga of Eslingena: A Musical, a play about life in a Latvian Displaced Persons camp in post-World War II Germany. North American audiences responded to Eslingena as performed memory. Anticipation of its performance in Riga suggested it might evoke countervailing memories that would trigger memory as a competition about suffering. Instead, Eslingena successfully mediated diasporic and homeland memories to produce a dialogue about agency grounded in differential experience.     

The death of ‘Socialism with a Latvian Face’: The purge of the Latvian national communists,July 1959–1962

The purge of the Latvian national communists was the most extensive of the Khrushchev era. This article offers the first comprehensive examination of the purge, based on research in Russian and Latvian archives, and utilizing recently released Communist Party personal files. Previous works rarely proceed beyond the beginning of the purge in July 1959 or provide only a cursory overview. This article, however, identifies patterns in the purge with a comprehensive analysis. The methodology of Arvīds Pel?e, the purge’s architect, is explored, exposing the purge’s six distinct phases, which ousted the national communists and defined Latvian politics for a quarter-century.     

Bilingualism and the pronunciation of Latvian intonations

For 50 years after World War II, Latvia was incorporated into the former Soviet Union. Although in theory the use of regional languages was not discouraged, in practice knowledge of Russian was obligatory. Since restoration of the country’s independence in 1991, Latvian has again become the official language, and knowledge of Russian is widespread but optional. These political events have created a natural experiment in the possible effects of almost universal bilingualism on a language. In this study, we examine the phonetic characteristics of the Latvian syllable intonations across generations. Native speakers of Latvian, ranging from retirement age to teens, were recorded reading a word list, sentences, and a short narrative. We find that younger speakers who used Latvian only about half of the time showed fading in their pronunciation of the intonations.     

Reasons for EU double standards: comparative overview of the cases of the Erased and the Non-citizens

On the basis of a comparative analysis of the case studies of the Slovenian Erased and the Latvian Non-citizens, the paper endeavors to identify the reasons for the EU involvement in the latter, but not the former case. These two situations are recognized as similar enough to be compared, and endure the counter-argumentation that the different EU approach is conditioned by the specifics of the local context, not by double standards. Hence, the paper comes to a conclusion that the involvement in Latvia has been conditioned by the fear of the potentially violent conflict, the existence of a proactive kin state, and a minority, significant in number, as well as the explicitly discriminatory legal framework that was in collision with the EU economic acquis. Thus, it has been inferred that double standards occur due to the lack of EU and international interest in these situations of human rights violations, where the powerful kin state and the minority, significant in number, are absent, do not have a potential to develop into a violent conflict, do not derive from explicitly discriminatory legal provision, and do not challenge the fundamental market freedoms of the EU.