da: The New York Times
TALLINN, Estonia — Sometime before year’s end, a man with a clipboard will drop by one of this city’s best schools, the Tallinn Pae Gymnasium, and the staff will begin to fret. He will saunter from classroom to classroom, ignoring the children and instead engaging in seemingly trivial chitchat with many of the teachers, 20 minutes at a time. Tell me, what subjects are your specialties? How long have you worked here? Can you explain to me a little about how you prepare your lessons?
He will not be particularly interested in what they say. He will care only about how they say it.
So watch that grammar. The language inspector is coming.
Estonia, a small former Soviet republic on the Baltic Sea, has been mounting a determined campaign to elevate the status of its native language and to marginalize Russian, the tongue of its…