ethnic minorities!!!

yes, Sinti and Roma is the official name of the German gypsy minority ere.

what exactly is culture? assimilation for me means merging of a new element into an old to form a new one, but especially Kalevipoeg sees to talk about absorbtion, that is (forced) submerging of a culture into a (larger) one were the old cultural elements got destroyed instead of added.

I agree with Tobodai. Some languages die from time to time. C'est la vie.

Languages are intended for the humans to understand each other, not to divide them. I hate English but if it serves me to communicate with you, it is OK.

My experience is that, when a minority is given a right they tend to destroy the formerly "big" language. I have been said that the destiny of Russian-speaking people in Baltic countries is sad.

In Spain we have no ethnic minorities. The closest are gitanos (gypsies). They are very few and are dissappearing as they attend school. His language (not very spred at any moment) is almost lost, though they have some words on their own. Some of them has passed to Spanish.

It is spoken Catalan in Catalonia (50% population has it as mother tongue), North Valencia and Balearic Islands. In these two regions the language is called "valenciano" and "mallorqu�n".

In Galicia most of the population understand Galician though most of people mixes it with Spanish.

In Pays Basque the basque language was almost dissappeared but its learning in school and the subsidies have turned it to life. Most of the population learns it at school but only a minority has it at mother tongue.

These languages were oppressed under Franco regime (although a Basque Academy was operating) but during democracy they are co-official in their territories. Currently Spanish - speaking people is claiming they are oppressed by non-Spanish speaking.

Bienvenido Caton !

de Mexico a La Madre Patria !

 Gachupin    hace mucho que no escuchaba esa palabra.

  Eres Castellano o Andaluz ?

  yo vivo en la Guadalajara americana.

Well the Russians didn't come here threw natural effects of immigration. They were kinda brought in by the soviets and stayed here after the USSR collapsed because Russia was too poor. Serves the commies right to be poor alone for a while.

I don't think you can compare Estonia with the US Tobodai. The US isn't in it's ideology and never has been a country for a single ethnicity/ nationality. An American can be a white, a Spanic, a Chinese, a black, but Estonia has been our land for thousands of years and we have lived here solo. I mean that North America can't be assimiliated by anyone because it doesn't belong to anyone for its true owners have been massacred a long time ago. Now white Americans complain that Mexicans and blacks might make the better part of the continents population soon (maybe they do now i don't really know) but how can you bring such an argument when the entire continent belongs to noone. It would be like the Britts complaining about the Indian population assimilating them in the 19th century India. Just silly. You can't compair and bring your view into a part of the world where we with right may oppose assimilation and not think of it as a "normal" process. There is no ethnicity who owns the USA today (except the none existant indians) and Americans can't in no way say that assimilation happens when it happens as there is no sense of a one single nation there, in the 20th century atleast. I don't want to be the USA with all sorts of different ethnicities running around assimilating my already vanishing nation. I am not a racist or anything but there is no argument an American can make about assimilation as they are already assimilated threw most races. 

I'm sad to say that two thirds of all mongols in the world are ethnic minorities. It's all the more sad that they sacrificed their freedom to give the other third, us, a shot. But knowing this, unites us and gives us strength and cause.

I'd suggest the estonians to first make the estonian public aware of what's happening in Russia (scary things are happening there, even to such large minorities with their own republics like buriats and kalmyks, I know) and try to establish a cultural connection to those who would identify themselves as ugro-finn. In such situation the moral help is most important. There is a big difference between feeling yourself as a member of a small, primitive and irrelevant tribe in woods and feeling shared identity and sincere support of a succesful independant nation-state like Estonia.

Has any of yous heard about Benjamin Lee Whorf?

The importance of different languages to the perception of reality is in the middle of his "linguistic relativity theory".

Today there are two theories (propositions) connected to the original theory:

"The Whorfian hypothesis of the language-cognition relationship actually contains two propositions which are best analyzed separately. The first maintains that the world is differently experienced and conceived in different language communities. This proposition has come to be known as linguistic relativity. The second proposition goes beyond the simple statement that there are differences in cognition associated with differences in language to claim that language actually causes these differences. This doctrine of linguistic determinism is essentially a conception of a one-way causal sequence among cognitive processes with language playing the directing role."