The Feb. 18 referendum has raised considerable emotion, and its outcome will continue to be fervently and diversely interpreted long after the event.

Latvia’s Central Election Commission is predicting a very large turnout of voters in line with the attendant public debate over whether Russian should become the second official state language. Many voters who have little bothered with recent parliamentary elections are likely to participate this time.

The result of the referendum is not in doubt. A majority vote will vote pret (against it), and there is no chance of the pro-Russian forces gaining the 771,350 votes needed to prevail. This figure may well be close to the number who vote against, with those voting par (for) an official status for Russian likely to receive half as many votes, or even less.

While the result is not in doubt, everything will rest on the post-referendum interpretations, and these will be strongly influenced by two factors.

First, the size of the vote against will be crucial. If the against figure is indeed around the 700,000 mark, with the for vote half of that, the pro-Russian party Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs) will be ecstatic. It will point out that something close to a third of the electorate wishes Russian to have this status, too large a percentage to ignore, and drive this issue relentlessly both in Latvia and in Europe, demanding a higher status for Russian where Russian-speakers are a significant proportion of the population.

Second, the distribution of the vote is important. If in certain large centres (particularly Daugavpils, with only a small proportion of Latvians, or in Rīga where the population is almost equally divided between Latvians and Russians or other Slavs) a majority of the locals vote for the official status of Russian, this will increase the push at the municipal levels to grant Russian particular privileges.

Awareness of these consequences has done a lot to mobilise Latvian politicians, albeit belatedly. While in the beginning many Latvian politicians seemed to view this event as a second-order issue, and had demonstrated little concern for language issues in the past, the outpouring of sentiment over the proposal—seen as a slap in the face by many in Latvia—has turned the politicians to urge voters to come to the referendum, even passing a resolution to that effect in the Saeima. Notable here also has been the much-despised Union of Greens and Farmers (Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība, or ZZS), seen as an oligarch party and partly responsible for Latvia’s economic crisis, which has tried to reassert its national credentials by urging that a million Latvians come and vote against the proposal. This would be an impressive figure, and give the Latvian side a far stronger position in post-referendum affairs.

An altogether woeful example of such belated realisation of the crucial nature of this referendum unfortunately has been Latvian President Andris Bērziņš, himself a former ZZS figure, who originally placed little stress on the referendum and said he would not even participate in it. While this no doubt was his attempt to pose the position of the president as above seeming political squabbles, there was so much criticism of him that eventually he changed his stance. In rather weasel language he asserted that citizen Bērziņš might have one view, but recent events have convinced President Bērziņš to nonetheless participate in the referendum and vote against the proposed amendments. This is perhaps just as well for him, otherwise there would be serious consideration of impeaching him for failing to uphold the Latvian language.

Meanwhile, as if in a parallel universe still, Bērziņš and other Latvian politicians continue to often use Russian in press conferences, on Russian television and other places, not seeing the long-terms consequences of such practices.

The campaign will continue

The success of the obnoxious Nationalbolshevik Vladimirs Lindermans (not even himself a Latvian citizen) in getting enough signatures to run this referendum presages a growing and orchestrated attack on Latvia, well supported by Moscow, where a mix of constitutional measures and dirty tricks will continue to be used to undermine the basis of the Latvian state.

Already a signature-gathering exercise has started to grant automatic Latvian citizenship to all permanent residents, bypassing the present system of naturalisation that requires a test of Latvian language, history and constitution to gain citizenship. At a social level, increasing numbers of incidents have been noted where individuals deliberately demand the use of Russian in public events or use Russian-only public signage where the use of Latvian is mandated.

Curiously, this all goes against the actual language situation in Latvia. Surveys from various agencies have shown that there is not a large unmeltable mass of Russian speakers who know no Latvian. In fact only about 8 percent of non-Latvians have no knowledge of Latvian, and all young non-Latvians command Latvian, thanks to heightened Latvian teaching in Russian-stream schools. Yet despite the spread of the knowledge of Latvian, the well-known propensity for Latvians to switch to Russian when in the presence of Russian-speakers persists, not among politicians alone.

Against this de facto improvement of the Latvian language situation, the politics will continue to be threatening. This campaign has seen a radicalisation of Russian political endeavours in Latvia. It will be interesting to see the outcome of this for Harmony Centre. This party has shown remarkable hypocrisy in its actions. Its leader Nils Ušakovs, mayor of Rīga, was instrumental in encouraging others to sign for the referendum when he himself signed—even though his party’s policy is for Latvian as the only official state language. He justified this by arguing this was not a referendum about language (!) but about self-respect. Parliamentary leader Jānis Urbanovičs and others have indicated they will vote for the proposal, thus directly going against their oath on taking up a parliamentary seat, where deputies swear to uphold the Latvian language. Some Harmony Centre members however are opposed to giving Russian official status; in order not to make such divisions public, the party decided to walk out of the two votes that the Saeima had on the referendum issue.

Whether this chain of events may lead to a split in Harmony Centre is an interesting question. Waiting in the wings are far more radical elements that will exploit any weakness in Harmony Centre to continue to champion that small but loud rump of the population that cannot abide an independent state of Latvia not under their control.

Every vote on Feb. 18 against the proposal is vital.

Latvia will go to a referendum sometime in the new year to vote on whether Russian should become the second official state language in Latvia.

The outcome is entirely predictable: some 700,000 votes are needed—half the total Latvian electorate—to vote in favour to approve this significant constitutional change, and that will not happen. Such a number or more may indeed vote against the proposal.

The entire effort may seem to be a waste of money and time. But its purpose may nevertheless have been achieved—to drive a wedge between Latvians and Russians in Latvia, perhaps even to sour Latvia-Russia relations, to show the relentless way in which various Russian forces insist on dominating independent Latvia.

Paragraph 4 of the constitution stipulates Latvian as the sole official state language, and this is what proponents are attempting to change.

Citizens have the right to initiate policy or constitutional changes in Latvia. First, 10,000 notarised signatures are required to support such a proposal, whereupon the Central Election Commission organises a second round of signature gathering, where around 150,000 signatures are required. In this case more than 12,000 notarised signatures were originally gathered, and a further 180,000 were gathered in November in the second round to force the issue to the Saeima and, ultimately, to a referendum.

The issue of language has been prominent since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Reinstating Latvian as the sole official state language—the status it enjoyed in the inter-war period—was a centrepiece of Latvia’s moves to regain independence. The Russian language had not only been the main language of the Soviet Union, it had also been the language of the large numbers of Russians and others who were settled in the Baltic states during the Soviet period and who have stayed on since. These settlers largely remained monolingual Russian speakers, being catered for with their own schools, media and services. Balts were virtually forced to become bilingual in their own language as well as Russian, while the Russian speakers had little incentive to learn the Baltic national languages. In the 1989 census, the last in the Soviet Union, only around 22 percent of non-Latvians in Latvia claimed a command of Latvian.

It should be noted immediately that this “Russian-speaking” population is very diverse in its language behaviour, as the last 20 years have attested. In this time Latvian has been taught more systematically in schools, public notices and correspondence are all in Latvian, and a knowledge of Latvian is essential in most occupations. This has led to a marked improvement in Latvian competence among non-Latvians: in the 2000 census the figure for non-Latvians commanding Latvian had risen to 58 percent. Many Russian speakers are fluent in Latvian now, but for some this is not a situation they approve of.

Promoting Russian

The Russian-oriented Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs) political party has long tried to upgrade the status of Russian, arguing particularly for its greater use in local government and administration. Yet its party platform supports Latvian as the sole official state language, and its deputies in the Saeima, in taking their oath upon election, must swear to uphold the constitution and specifically to uphold the status of Latvian.

In this instance it was initiators from outside Harmony Centre who began the campaign. The main figure was the controversial Vladimirs Lindermans, who has been an unusually professional dissident now for the past three decades. He was a thorn in the side of the old Soviet Union, criticising the slow pace of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. For a while he even joined the Latvian People’s Front campaigning for an independent Latvia, but then veered sharply in his politics to his present nationalbolshevik sympathies, mixing communist politics with acute Russian chauvinism. He has been at serious odds with both Latvian and Russian governments for his extremism, and was sentenced to prison in Latvia for advocating the violent overthrow of the state and for possessing explosives. He also was incarcerated for shorter periods, as well as was denied citizenship, by the Russian government.

Ostensibly, he began this campaign to counter the unsuccessful move last year by nationalists in Latvia, led by All for Latvia! (Visu Latvijai!) political party, to have the state finance only schools that have Latvian as their language of instruction, thus threatening the still extensive Russian-language school system. The venture failed, but this was seen as an antagonistic anti-Russian move that angered many.

Yet it would be wrong to see this as only a tit for tat.

The activities of Lindermans has posed dilemmas for Harmony Centre. Officially, the party supports Latvian as the only official language. However, several party members have expressed support for Lindermans’ move, including the blustering parliamentary leader Jānis Urbanovičs, but most importantly Rīga’s Russian mayor, Nils Ušakovs, who dramatically added his signature in the second week of the campaign, igniting a flurry of interest and spectacularly increasing the rate at which signatures were then gathered.

Ušakovs has since tried to be all things to all parties, hypocritically making speeches arguing for the need to strengthen Latvian particularly in the work of local government, and protesting that adding his signature was not an attack on Latvian but merely an act of respect for Russian speakers.

Significantly, a number of other Harmony Centre deputies such as Igors Pimenovs opposed Lindermans’ campaign, arguing that the earlier provocation by Latvian nationalists should not be responded to by this Russian provocation in turn. But a small number of Saeima deputies have added their signatures, calling into question the oath of loyalty they give upon taking their places in the Saeima, though in the blasé world of Latvian politics keeping promises can rarely be enforced, and there are no sanctions stipulated for breaking the oath.

Interestingly, Latvian politicians have appeared to wake from a slumber over this issue. Language issues have usually not been high on the agenda of most Latvian politicians. Few Saeima deputies supported the move to have Latvian language schools only. But they have belatedly woken to the damage this referendum will do. President Andris Bērziņš, having been equivocal on language issues before, has now strongly defended Latvian and questioned Ušakovs’ competence. The Union of Greens and Farmers (Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība), a party that lost many seats in the recent elections and needs to restore its credibility with an electorate too mindful of its links with powerful oligarchs, is playing the national card and started a campaign to get a million votes against the Russian proposal.

The referendum will solidly vote against Russian as a second official language, but the damage has been done, highlighting supposed ethnic differences and ignoring of the Russian minority. Latvia has in fact experienced no ethnic tensions at the personal or community level, and people are far more concerned with the everyday issues such as the economy (painfully slowly recovering), and the recent collapse of yet another bank—Latvijas Krājbanka—under suspicious circumstances. Yet for some politicians, playing on ethnic allegiances is more important.

It has been more than three years since the first Apple iPhone was introduced in the Baltics. Not only has the user interface and phone technology been constantly improving, but Latvian language support has become even better and new Latvian applications ranging from reading Latvian newspapers, checking tram timetables to translating Latvian text and listening to a favourite Latvian radio station have appeared in the iTunes App store.

With the recently introduced voice-enabled iPhone 4S worldwide, Apple continues its streak of record-breaking sales. The upgrade of Apple’s tablet computer, the iPad2, earlier this year is also leaving its mark on enterprises by disrupting business models and restructuring IT departments. The industry has been affected so dramatically that manufacturers that once were dominant players are desperately seeking the ideal hardware and software combination to catch up in this transformational era of touch screen-based mobile computing.

For the estimated 40,000 iPhone and 5,000 iPad users currently in Latvia, both the iOS4 and iOS5 software upgrades introduced further Latvian language support.  The Latvian date format on the welcome screen is fixed and Latvian language purists now get the “ŗ” (or palatalised r) option by touching the “r” key for more than a second. iOS5 provides dictionary support for the Latvian language for the first time, however Latvian didn’t make the short list of languages used by Siri, Apple’s smart new voice recognition software introduced with the iPhone 4S.

Although the App store for the Baltics has operated since April 2009 it is only in the last 18 months that have we seen a flurry of new apps and new developers attracted to the platform. Among them is 15-year-old Kristers Jursevskis, author of the Doit app. Latvian newspapers and magazines are not wasting any time either by producing iPhone and iPad versions of their content. This is a boon for Latvians living abroad who still want to keep abreast of the latest news and gossip, but don’t want to have to wait up to a week to receive the paper version via snail mail. Dienas mediji offers the daily edition of Diena for only USD 11 per month. Dienas mediji has made a significant investment in its own customised reader application, which apart from the occasional hiccup with the display of photos is very easy to use. Downloading the daily issue normally takes only a minute or two.

Dienas mediji also produce an iPad only publication called piektDiena that includes news from the previous week, adds some weekly video footage by journalist Māris Zanders and is a little more interactive than the regular Diena PDF version. When it was first launched in June of this year the downloads were a hefty 220MB is size, but nonetheless were quick to download. Six months later and still with a free price tag Dienas mediji has managed to reduce the weekly edition to half the file size. However, this hasn’t helped reduce the network load and it now takes several attempts to download piektDiena successfully. Dienas mediji also offer Dienas Bizness (USD 30 per month or USD 2.15 per issue) and and iPad-only version of the weekly Lietišķā Diena (Zurnāls LD) at USD 99 cents per issue.

The Lilita publishing house has also been providing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad versions of all of its magazines since earlier this year using the Zinio publishing platform. Magazines such as Copes Lietas, Kas Jauns, Pastaiga, Lilita, Geo, NEXT, FHM, Cosmopolitan, Latvijas Arhitektūra and Latvijas Būvniecība can all be enjoyed at the discounted price to the printed version. With the release of iOS5 and the new Newstand feature, Apple’s own publishing platform, it will be interesting to observe what Zinio and the others will do, because ultimately the user will want to visit only one place for all their subscribed newspapers and magazines.

Swedbank has led the way in providing a mobile banking application (Swedbank Latvija) enabling customers to check their account balance, view previous transactions, pay bills, transfer funds, check currency rates and perform many other useful tasks. It took a whole year before other banks offered similar applications—Rietumu banka with its iRietumu App and dnBNord (DNB Latvija) which became available on the App store earlier this month. SEB banka has Estonian and Lithuanian versions, but a Latvian app is yet to be seen.

Trans Riga, created by independent developer Kristaps Grīnbergs, presents the tram, trolleybus and bus timetables of Rīga in an easy to use interface on the iPhone. Clicking on the map icon displays the route in Google Maps which users can then zoom in for more detail. A useful addition to this application, especially for tourists not familiar with Rīga, is to determine the visitor’s current location and list all of the available nearby public transport. And what about train timetables as well as reporting on public transport delays in real time? Admittedly this would be difficult to do without the cooperation of the Rīga public transport authority, which currently does not release this kind of data.

Ardis Markss from E Forma has produced a simple, but effective educational application (Ābece) targetted at both pre-school children and adults to learn the Latvian alphabet. Each letter has been beautifully drawn and users can also click to hear pronunciation of each word.

One of the more active mobile application developers has been the Rīga-based Cube advertising agency led by Mārtiņš Dambis. Applications include a television programming guide (Lattelecom TV) commissioned by one of the leading cable and digital TV providers in Latvia (I would love to see this app also become a remote control for switching channels and selecting TV shows so that I can finally throw out the old remote); a Līgo song app (LMT Līgo Līgo) that at the shake of the iPhone can provide the words and tune to many Jāņi songs while celebrating the summer solstice; an events guide to this year’s Positivus 11 music festival; a live audio stream from the progressive radio station Radio 101 as well as a video stream to view what’s happening in the studio; and a shopping guide (Alfas dāvanas) from one of the largest shopping centres in Rīga to help users decide what to buy.

Inspired by the Alice in Wonderland app, Jānis Liepiņš has translated a Latvian folktale into English, added stunning illustrations with animation and adapted it for the iPad to captivate both young and old audiences. Liepiņš even pulled out all stops to make a YouTube video promoting the special King’s Daughters iPad interactive book. I am eagerly waiting for the Latvian version so that I can enjoy it together with my youngest son before bedtime.

The software development company Tilde, best known for its Latvian spelling, grammar and translation software, has released the Translation app that can translate whole sentences from Latvian to English, English to Latvian and Latvian to Russian. It is free, but you’ll need to be connected to the Internet via WiFi or 3G. airBaltic has an iPhone app (airBaltic) to view timetables and flight status, as well as access online check-in facilities. There is also a companion app for the airline’s frequent flyers (BalticMiles). CSN Test will help users prepare for the challenging 30 multiple choice questions presented in the driver’s theory exam; Latvian Nouns provides an instant reference to noun, adjective, numeral and pronoun declensions (apologies for the shameless plug); DPD LV allows customers to track shipments online from pick-up to delivery; Riga in Your Pocket puts its popular tourist guide on an iPhone (Riga) with updates on a regular basis; and the draugiem.lv app has revamped its user interface and removed the charging mechanism for iPhone users. As a fan of Latvian ice hockey I tried to retrieve the Dinamo Rīga app, but it seems that access to this could be restricted to the territory of Latvia, which leaves me no other option than to visit the real game next time I’ll be in Rīga.

To find the latest and greatest Latvian app, click on the flag on the right bottom of the iTunes screen and select Latvia. The iTunes Latvia store has been available since August. Another alternative is to regularly check Web sites such as mac.tunt.lv, which provides further links to macpasaule.lv and ipods.lv. Yet another option is to download the new app called “Lietotnes latviski,” the primary goal is to help manage one’s way through the plethora of new Latvian apps that are now appearing on a weekly basis. However, at the time of writing not all apps were included and updates have been sporadic.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of Latvian apps, but it gives an appreciation for the diversity now available. I look forward to the day when Latvian utilities, TV stations and government departments will open up their data to the community to pave the way for even more innovative and exciting mobile applications, no matter where one may be located worldwide.