Estonian Language Being Crowded Out of Academia by English
While at Latvian and Lithuanian universities only around 20 percent of doctor's theses are defended in English, the University of Tartu has for sometime been on a different track.
Around 80 percent of doctoral dissertations are in English at the university, leaving the Estonian language as a niche primarily for philologists, reported Postimees.
It is a different story with master's theses, which are still mostly submitted in Estonian, but here too there are fields of study where English dominates.
These developments question the role of national universities and the role of the Estonian language in research and science. The most recent development came last week, when the University of Tartu decided to switch its graduate level philosophy program from an Estonian to an English curriculum.