According to the data of the population census in 2011, 84.2 per cent of the total population of the Republic of Lithuania were Lithuanians, 6.6 per cent Poles, 5.8 per cent Russians, 1.2 per cent Belarusians, 0.5 per cent Ukrainians, and 0.6 per cent other nationalities. Most residents of the largest ethnic groups indicated their language as their native language: Lithuanians 99.2 per cent, Poles 77.1 per cent, and Russians 87.2 per cent. Answers to the question about foreign languages showed that about 78.5 per cent of the population knew at least one foreign language. 41.6 per cent of the population spoke one foreign language, 29 per cent spoke two languages, 6.6 per cent spoke three languages, and 1.3 per cent spoke four and more languages. The biggest share of the population spoke Russian (63 per cent), 30.4 per cent English, 8.5 per cent Polish, and 8.3 per cent German.
The Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania, approved in 1992, establishes Lithuanian as a state language (Article 14). Article 37 of the Constitution provides that citizens, who belong to ethnic communities, shall have the right to foster their language, culture, and customs.
The Law on the State Language (1995) regulates the use of the state language in the public life of Lithuania, protection and control of the state language, and the responsibility for violations of the Law on State Language. According to the Law, the laws of the Republic of Lithuania and other legal acts shall be adopted and promulgated in the state language; all institutions, establishments, enterprises and organisations that function in the Republic of Lithuania shall manage filing work, accounting, reporting, financial and technical documents in the state language; legal proceedings in the Republic of Lithuania shall be conducted in the state language; the State shall guarantee the residents of the Republic of Lithuania the right to acquire general, vocational, higher post-school and university education in the state language. The Law does not regulate the unofficial communication of the population and the language of events of religious communities as well as persons belonging to ethnic communities.
The policy of the state language is shaped by the State Language Commission. The tasks of the Commissions are to decide issues concerning the implementation of the Law on the State Language; submit to Seimas, the President of the Republic and the Government, proposals on language policy and implementation of the Law on State Language and submit to Seimas conclusions regarding the language of legal acts; establish the directions of regulating the Lithuanian language; decide the issues of standardisation and codification of the Lithuanian language; appraise and approve the most important standardising language works (dictionaries, reference books, guidebooks and textbooks); etc.
The State Language Inspectorate is a policy implementation body whose objectives, functions, organisation and procedure of work are regulated by the Law on the State Language Inspectorate (2001). The main function of the Inspectorate is to control whether the activities of state, municipal and other institutions, companies, and organisations operating in the Republic of Lithuania comply with the Law on State Language, resolutions of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language and other legal acts establishing requirements for the use and correctness of the State language activity.
In 2018, the Seimas approved the State Language Policy Guidelines 2018–2022. The guidelines are mostly concerned with factors that exert a negative impact on the current condition of the State language, such as competition between the Lithuanian language and other languages in the spheres of public life; inefficient linguistic education in society and its insufficiently active involvement (participation) in the initiatives on supporting and strengthening the Lithuanian language; insufficiently rapid codification of the norms of the standard language due to the fragmentation of research into the usage and supervision and a lack of research into the linguistic principles of society; a too slow localisation of computer programmes which does not always meet the needs of society; insufficient response of the institutions related to the teaching of the state language to intensified emigration, immigration and remigration processes and the increased need for teaching (learning) the Lithuanian language.
In 2019, the State Language Commission approved the Strengthening Programme of Lithuanian Language Prestige. The aim of the programme is to strengthen the prestige of the Lithuanian language in Lithuania and among Lithuanian-speaking emigrants and to develop the linguistic awareness of the society, its activity and confidence in language capacity. For the implementation of the programme in 2020–2024, it is planned to allocate 1 143 000 EUR from the state budget appropriations assigned to the Commission.
Several language promotion measures are funded by the Lithuanian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport. The most popular of them is the annual National Dictation Competition that has been organised 13 times. Every year the State Language Inspectorate organises a Competition of the Most Beautiful Name of a Company. The State Language Commission gives awards for significant works in the field of Lithuanian terminology, promotion of the language of science and linguistic education of the public. The Society of Lithuanian Language organises the elections of the Word of the Year and the Saying of the Year that are also very popular among the residents of Lithuania.
In recent years, the main debate in the field of language policy has dealt with the “names spelling issue”. Article 7 of the Lithuanian Law on the State Language provides that personal names of the citizens of the Republic of Lithuania in official documents (e.g. ID documents, passports) shall have the forms prescribed by laws, i.e. have to be written in the Lithuanian alphabet. The Lithuanian alphabet is based on Latin and consists of 32 letters: the Latin characters with extra nasal letters (ą, ę, į, ų) and letters with diacritics (č, š, ž, ė, ū). The alphabet does not contain the Latin letters “w”, “q” and “x” and this causes problems for the national minority group representatives willing to name their children in accordance with their culture, tradition or language. It also poses a difficulty for Lithuanian women when marrying foreigners and wishing for their surnames to be written in the same way as the surnames of their husbands on documents issued in Lithuania. According to the data, this problem concerns a substantial number of people annually, as many as 16% of marriages are of a mixed character. Furthermore, within ten years, the number of children born beyond the borders of the country has increased from 1% to 16% (2011). Such marriages and the resulting offspring want their family name to be written in its unchanged form in all documents issued within Lithuanian borders.
Discussions on the original spelling of non-Lithuanian names in documents have been taking place for decades. Politicians of the Polish community in Lithuania and their supporters in Poland have long been asking to be allowed to use Polish letters in the last names of Polish speakers, an issue that has been emerging in bilateral Lithuanian-Polish relations. Critics say that non-Lithuanian characters would undermine the status of the Lithuanian language as the official language and, furthermore, can cause trouble in reading non-Lithuanian last names. In January of 2022, the Parliament adopted the Law on the writing of personal names and surnames in documents. The Law has allowed Lithuanian citizens to use the letters “q”, “x” and “w”, which do not exist in the Lithuanian alphabet, if they assume the surnames of their non-Lithuanian spouses. This will also apply if the surname of the parent is spelled in non-Lithuanian characters, as well as if the parents, grandparents or ancestors had or have the citizenship of another country and their first and last names were spelled in non-Lithuanian characters. The original spelling of names in Latin-based characters without diacritical marks will also be allowed if a Lithuanian citizen acquired their first and last names in a foreign country and the names are spelled in these characters in the source document.
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