90 Years of the mother tongue society

Abstract

The Mother Tongue Society (Emakeele Selts) was founded at the University of Tartu in 1920 and joined the Academy of Sciences in 1946. The main activities of the society have been scholarly communication, publication of research and language materials, dialect gathering, language management, and popularization of linguistic knowledge. Scholarly communication has been carried out in the format of meetings with presentations and conferences. Since 1968 an annual linguistic conference in honour of Johannes Voldemar Veski has been organized each year. In 1922-1940 the society published the journal"Eesti Keel" (Estonian Language); in 1955 the scholarly journal"Emakeele Seltsi aastaraamat" (ESA; Yearbook of the Mother Tongue Society) began publication. In addition to periodicals, the Mother Tongue Society has also published its proceedings. During the first period of independence the Mother Tongue Society committed itself to the organization of systematic collection of Estonian dialects. By the end of 1940 over 720,000 slips with dialect words and almost 6,500 pages of dialect texts and dialect surveys had been collected. After the war dialect gathering continued through local informants, but by the 1980s the possibilities to gather older dialects had been exhausted. The Mother Tongue Society paid a great deal of attention to language planning. In the pre-war years the Estonianization of foreign (mostly German and Russian) personal names was a major undertaking. In 1960 the committee of the Mother Tongue Society was set up for the purpose of recommended correct usage. Since 1997 it has functioned as an official norm-setting committee. Despite the fact that the Mother Tongue Society has primarily always been a scholarly society, it has also provided linguistic education of people as well as generated interest and created a positive image of the mother tongue. In the 1960s the society started to hold language days at schools, in the 1990s language days for Estonians living abroad. In 2000 the society started to publish a popular language journal"Oma Keel" (Our Own Language).