This book serves above all as important background reading for the many nationalist tensions that we currently see in the Baltic region and more broadly in Eastern Europe. It describes the gradual evolution of language policy in Latvia since the early 1990s, primarily in relation to how policy has sought to successively promote Latvian language in national life, while scaling back the use of Russian. The volume is best read as an introductory source to the many additional language policy changes Latvia has made the headlines with since 2022, i.e. when Melanie Frank’s empirical research concluded. These include the full-scale discontinuation of Russian-language schooling in the country and evermore strident calls for a Latvianization of the public sphere.

The strongest value-added of this work is therefore its Chapter 6, which provides an election-by-election overview of how language issues have fed into party campaigns as well as subsequent government formation processes over a period of nearly 30 years. In doing so, Frank embeds the analysis of language policy debate into the evolution of the party system as well as the course of overall national governance. What Frank shows quite clearly is that the fundamental ethnic cleavage in Latvia’s party system – where the main party seeking to defend Russian-speakers’ interests (broadly known as the Harmony Party) has been excluded from coalition-building ever since re-independence in 1991 – has ended up reinforcing increasingly nationalist approaches to language policy, since almost all of the governing coalitions that have emerged from parliamentary elections have ended up being disproportionately influenced by nationalist Latvian parties.

Hence, one can see a steady progression of political impulses to anchor the Latvian language as not only the sole state language, but also the primary language of societal communication. The latter implies making Latvian more prevalent in the private sector, ending Russian-language instruction in schools and curtailing public broadcasting in Russian language. The overarching rationale is that Latvian society will be more integrated the more all members of society use Latvian as their primary linguistic framework.

Yet Melanie Frank’s very meticulous summary of electoral and governmental politics does not only serve the purpose of compiling an empirical-historical record. She also aims to show that by consistently failing to incorporate minority Russian political interests, Latvian politicians have pushed the boundaries of democratic legitimacy in what they have been doing. Frank spends her Chapter 2 laying out a conceptual framework for making deeper sense of Latvia’s policy evolution by noting that any shift toward a more nationalist stance could be justified, were it accompanied by sufficient “input-” and “output-” legitimacy, meaning minority participation and satisfaction. However, her analysis of the electoral and political facts shows that this dialogue has been scarcely present, which leads her ultimately to conclude that there is a “legitimation crisis” afflicting Latvian language policy and, by extension, democracy more broadly.

Frank is very delicate in making her arguments. These arise above all in the final Chapter 7, where she declares, for example, “Im lettischen Fall bestand […] zwar während der Phase der Regimetransformation das Potenzial, die Herausforderungen der Demokratisierung mit einer Förderung der lettischen Sprache und Kultur zu verbinden; dieses Potenzial wurde jedoch nicht ausgeschöpft.” (p. 212)

Her conclusions could have been more hard-hitting, however, had the work adopted a more rigorous research design and analytical frame. By the first point I mean that what actually preoccupies Frank throughout nearly a quarter of the book is a broader four-country comparison of Latvia alongside Estonia, Ukraine and Moldova. She justifies this approach by wanting to contextualize the Latvian case better and thereby be able to tease out more accurate conclusions. However, the end result is a classic “neither fish nor fowl” situation, where much ink is spent recounting the Stalin-era history of Ukraine or language debates during the perestroika period in Moldova, but there is never a consistent comparison across the four cases using the same kind of input/output legitimacy framework that is ultimately applied to the Latvian case. There is little real analytical mileage gained from these various excursus across the border.

Likewise, the work misses an opportunity to actually define what is meant by its central analytical concept – language policy. Although Frank gives a cursory overview of what various sociolinguists have defined as language policy (see section 2.1.1.), nowhere does she herself operationalize what she will track more precisely under that notion. One of the first points of departure, of course, is Latvia’s official Law on Language (as amended several times over the course of 30 years). This sphere not only covers official language use, but also tends to set up systems for enforcing language rules in the private sector, including language proficiency requirements for service personnel like doctors or cashiers. In turn, such laws often set up language inspectorates and other enforcement mechanisms, all intended to create a clear linguistic hierarchy.

However, Frank also tips into numerous other realms that affect the use of languages in society and are often covered by other laws. The first area that has pervaded Latvian politics since 1991 is citizenship policy and specifically the level of Latvian language proficiency required for naturalization among those several hundred thousand Soviet-era settlers to Latvia who were denied automatic citizenship in the early 1990s by virtue of Latvia’s claim that these individuals had come to the country during an illegal (Soviet) occupation and therefore were not de jure citizens of the restored state.

Likewise, there are clear language policy dimensions to education policy, i.e. how long or in what proportion Russian-language schooling should continue to be allowed? Further, language policy can be seen in media policy, i.e. support for public broadcasting in minority languages or suspending retransmission of Russian Federation media. And lastly, there is the degree to which the state might spend resources to start a pro-active language training program to help minorities acquire the state language and not only use forfeits as policy.

To her credit, Frank covers all of these dimensions in one way or another. However, they are not systematized into an analytical lens that would allow us (more like a spider graph) to see when and how the overall notion of “language policy” has branched out and evolved. Moreover, even if Frank’s very close recitation of electoral debates and coalition agreements are good indicators of democratic legitimacy, they do not serve as a summary of actual change in policy (laws and regulations). A methodical tracking of that central notion is lacking.

Hence, Frank’s work offers us an opportunity mainly to reflect on how democratic the evolution of language policy in Latvia has been. Her judgment is ultimately negative and the way in which she arrives at that assessment is solid. However, the study could have been analytically tighter with a better conceptualization of language policy and without the unfulfilled promise of the comparative country-cases.