Amendments to the law have been proposed in Estonia that would reinstate the requirement of a certain level of proficiency in the language for taxi drivers and the changes would also apply to couriers delivering food, Estonian public media reported. ERR.
The law plans to determine the extent to which foreign languages may be used in supermarket advertisements, as well as prohibit other national language issues. Amendments to the existing language law still need to be considered and approved by the Rīga Kogu, and must receive the president’s approval before coming into effect.
Estonian Minister of Education and Science Tõnis Lukas said changes to the law are needed because society is changing and it is important to demonstrate that the main language of communication in any field is Estonian.
The changes in the law will especially affect the service sector, where language skills are weak or sometimes even non-existent.
Lukas said: “With this amendment to the law, we will protect the interests of consumers of Estonian as a service, and this will be a significant support for the status of the Estonian language as the sole state language, making it more visible and dominant in public places, and this goal is also visible in the Estonian language development plan.”
For taxi drivers, the law change would mean that a taxi license (Employee card) must demonstrate knowledge of the national language at least at level B1. Those who obtained their driving license before the law came into force will also have to prove their language skills. These changes actually mean a return to the regulation that was in place before March 2016.
Changes to the language law will also affect audio ads. So far, they are not linguistically regulated and, for example, advertisements in supermarkets are also reproduced in English and Russian. According to the ministry, this means that people who spend only a short time in the shop may not hear the information in Estonian. Advertisements in foreign languages will not be prohibited, but may not exceed 20% of the total amount of advertisements.
The changes also await website maintainers: if the amendments to the law are approved, only Estonian words will be allowed to be used in the domain names of the home pages of state and local government institutions. This means that another domain will have to be considered, for example the Ministry of Environment of Estonia, whose current domain name is envir.ee. Also new is the requirement included in the amendments to the law that any text in the name or description of a service, product or institution must be equally visible in Estonian. This will apply to brands like KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken).
So far the language law has had little effect on those who work through apps, but the changes will also affect these people, mainly couriers for food delivery companies.
The Estonian Language Commission said it has often received complaints about disagreements that arose due to little or no knowledge of the Estonian language. The Ministry of Education and Science said that this is exactly why changes to the legislation are needed: the situation in society has changed and new problems have arisen in the last decade that were not relevant before.
