Count us! Ethnic Activism in South-Eastern Estonia, and the Census of 2011

Abstract

The ethnic activists of south Estonia (the Seto and Võro movements), challenging traditional concepts of the Estonian nation, tried to exploit the last national census (2011) for their cause, but were only partly successful because of opposition from decision-makers at Statistics Estonia, who have demonstrated a spontaneous conservatism in regard to questions of ethnicity and language. The government’s response to the initiatives of the ethnic activists was inconsistent, passive, and reactive. This matter has simply not been thought through at the state level.

Keywords:

• census
• dialects
• regional identity
• ethnic activism
• nationalism
• Estonia
• Seto
• Võro

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Estonian Science Foundation under Grant number 9271.

Notes

1 The two regional ethnic units and their dialects/languages are called the Võru and the Setu in Standard Estonian and the Võro and the Seto in their own dialects/languages.

2 On the Võro movement and its historical background, see Raag 2010, 132–39, 144–46; and Koreinik 2011, 241–44.

3 On the Seto movement, see Jääts 2000; and Kuutma, Seljamaa, and Västrik 2012, 58–63.

4 For information on the situation of the Latgalian language in Latvia, see Lazdiņa and Marten 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Indrek Jääts

Indrek Jääts (PhD) is an ethnologist educated at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His primary research interests are ethnicity, nationalism, and nationalities policy in Eastern Europe. He has focused his attention on the cases of the Seto, Komi (Zyrians) and Komi-Permyaks. He is currently working as a researcher at the Estonian National Museum.