In her introduction, Ksenia Maksimovtsova emphasizes that “whereas language policy in Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine is extensively studied by sociologists, linguists etc.…there is still a lack of comparative research dealing with the public discourses on language policy” (22). The author intends to fill this gap. The introduction is followed by Chapters I: “The Theories of Social Constructionism in Relation to Nation-Building and Social Problems” (31–77); II: “Methodological Implications of Discourse Analysis” (79–117); III: “Language Policy Development in Contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine” (119–210), IV, V, and VI: “Public Debates on Language Policy within the Discourse of the Russian-Language Blogs on News Websites” in Ukraine, Latvia, and Estonia (211–425); and VII: “Comparing the Discourses of Language Policy in Contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine” (427–47). The introductory chapters offer lengthy compilations of theories of constructivism and discourse analysis. In the empirical part, then, the author repeatedly refers to labels like “the rhetoric of loss,” “the rhetoric of entitlement”; the added value is not always clear. According to the author, the concordance tool AntConc, which is in fact “designed mainly for linguists…can be fruitfully applied in social sciences, which is also proven in this study” (115). How precisely AntConc was used for searching arguments, and not keywords, remains a secret.
As Maksimovtsovaʼs corpus is largely confined to Russian-language materials, unprepared readers are exposed to a lack of balance (Maksimovtsova occasionally admits that it would be important to include materials written in the “titular languages”: 18, 407). The book has more shortcomings: the English language should have been edited much more carefully. More importantly, the conceptualization of the book leads to unpleasant consequences: Maksimovtsova looks at various blogs that refer to some major events in the recent history of Ukrainian, Latvian, and Estonian language policy, and she cites and counts the arguments in each section separately devoted to this or that event. However, as the arguments are extremely stereotypical, the author cites them dozens of times; she also repeats her comments, often word by word, but frequently offers little more than just labels (“rhetoric of loss”). The author could have sampled her statistical observations to avoid this. The problem remains, however, that any quantification that is based just on one or two, sometimes three ever varying blogs can barely be regarded as representative.
The “intertextual” character of the cited arguments remains unrevealed to unprepared readers too: many statements in the blogs (including those using the labels “Nazis” or “fascists”) merely repeat Russian media propaganda. Some politicians or “experts” that are cited in the book should have been accompanied with brief portraits: Tatiana Ždanok, who is officially Tatjana Ždanoka, was fighting against Latvian independence in the early 1990s, and she supported Vladimir Putinʼs annexation of the Crimea; Viktor Medvedchuk is one of Putinʼs closest allies in Ukraine, and Ruslan Bortnik (Bortnyk) was an active member of the pro-Putin organization “Russian-Speaking Ukraine.”
Occasionally, the author follows some questionable discursive lines of the blog materials. With utmost frequency, she suggests that the only alternative to any possible discrimination against the Russian language is its introduction as a second state language. Readers will also be astonished to read more than once that language policy is not a purely linguistic issue, which is a truism.
The “hard facts” of language policy are often presented very superficially. Some recent education laws are characterized as if minority languages were banned from the schools altogether, which is not true. The fact that the former Ukrainian President Petro Porošenko tried “to encourage Ukrainians to learn English” is surprisingly depicted as something absurd–allegedly, Porošenko labelled Russian “the language of aggressors” (153), but no reference is provided.
Many categorizations are highly questionable: is the statement that “Latvia is the only homeland of Latvians in the world where they can speak and protect their language” really “nationalist” (373; notably, Maksimovtsova tries to be balanced in many other ways; she does not follow Russian propaganda)?
Summing up, what readers learn from 507 pages is little more than how often this or that highly stereotypical argument regarding the official status of Russian in a minority situation appears in a not particularly representative corpus.
