Paper short abstract:

This paper elaborates on Estonian civil society initiatives bringing together Russian- and Estonian-speakers to learn each others' languages together and foster informal integration.

Paper long abstract:

Despite certain positive views on integration of Russian-speakers in Estonia (Laitin, 2003), most scholars agree that this group constituting 29% of Estonian population has experienced segregation from the majority ethnic Estonian group, which is visible in secondary and higher education, labor market, income, residential distribution, consumption, leisure, etc. Although the concepts of integration and segregation are overloaded with different meanings and difficult to measure, in Estonia, this is undoubtedly the language division which matters. Since gaining independence, Estonian state has struggled to foster Estonian language acquisition for Russian speakers through a variety of elaborated policies, however, a lot of resources have been spent on the infamous integration of Russophones in vain.

As a response to the state failures, several civil society initiatives emerged, providing platforms for informal integration. Among others, in this presentation, I focus on the particular case of language clubs providing venues for Estonian- and Russian-speakers interaction. They almost do not require financial or human resources yet become much more successful that their well-funded and thought-through state-sponsored counterparts. In this paper based on ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on the vernacular perspective on the language clubs to analyze why these informal organizations are more successful than professional initiatives and how their experience may be beneficial for making improvements in the state-supported integration.