Ministry and EKI heed justice chancellor in dictionary reform dispute
The Ministry of Education and Research and the Institute of the Estonian Language (EKI) have reached an agreement regarding the new version of the Dictionary of Standard Estonian (ÕS) in line with recommendations from Estonia's chancellor of justice, according to which the new ÕS will be similar to previous versions.
Andero Adamson, head of the ministry's language policy department, said that by amending the activity plan, the Education Ministry wants to resolve legal questions posed by the justice chancellor.
"The new ÕS will present written language norms and recommendations alongside explanations and reasoning. This means that the next ÕS will also be a guiding and prescriptivist dictionary that not only describes use of language, but also provides recommendations of which linguistic forms should be avoided and suitable alternatives," Adamson said via a press release.
The activity plan for the new ÕS and EKI's guide to the dictionary was approved in 2023 and is based on the Estonian language development plan 2035. The recent version of the roadmap prescribed publishing the 2025 version of ÕS as a user-oriented view of the EKI general dictionary. But Chancellor of Justice Ülle Madise warned the ministry and the institute in March that publishing ÕS in this form might clash with the Language Act and the Estonian Constitution.
Director of EKI Arvi Tavast said that amending the activity plan is necessary for legal clarity, both as concerns standard written Estonian and e-examinations.
"The debates surrounding ÕS come as a sign of the viability of the Estonian language and that it matters to its users, which is definitely positive. In this situation, we needed to reconcile science and the law as the language and relevant research develop faster than legislation. We managed to strike the necessary compromise working with the ministry – the traditional ÕS will continue to concentrate on normative language, while other EKI dictionaries will serve the language as it lives and develops," Tavast noted.
This means that the 2025 ÕS will be based on the currently valid version from 2018 both on paper and online.
The Institute of the Estonian Language said in its press release that it hopes the ÕS, where it considers the recommendations of the justice chancellor, will better meet the need of language editors and language teachers, and that peace can be restored in linguistic circles.
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Editor: Mirjam Mäekivi, Marcus Turovski
