For Latvian Press 2, Fascist
Posted in Society on September 25th, 2008
RIGA – This blog is in English. Outside of this blog, I use three languages frequently interchanging them, each with some kind of accent.
At a recent gathering of old friends, someone told me to speak Russian properly. Another time, a Latvian woman who interviewed me in Latvian for the European Commission survey asked me four times if it’d be easier to switch to Russian because of my obscure accent. When I was in the US last time, some people thought I was from Saskatchewan, eh?
Latvian is my outside language, though at times, it can be < a href="http://allaboutlatvia.com/article/680/misplaced-languages/">challenging to have a conversation if your Latvian is even slightly accented. I try to use it whenever possible unless I know a person doing the customer service is a Russian. You can figure out by the person’s name, their slight accent, however, admittedly it’s becoming harder and harder to distinguish people’s native language. Unless of course they want you to know it: they wrap themselves in a Russian tricolor, or wear a shirt that reads, Россия, or CCCP.
In two recent incidents, language laws, common courtesy, and market forces collided in a spectacular fashion, too typical for a small country like Latvia, exposing more chronic lack of manners and absence of culture of courtesy.
At the end of August, a passenger at the Riga International Airport spilled coffee on a waitress, following a run-in with her in the language department. The man asked for the service in the state language at the Coffee Nation shop inside the transit area of the airport. The woman refused, saying this is a transit area and laws of Latvia do not apply here. She called him a fascist. He spilled hot coffee on her. She called the police, which ended up costing him Ls 50 for swearing and hooliganism and made him miss his flight to Berlin.
The man demanded the language police and other authorities look into the language knowledge of the Coffee Nation employees.
Today, the state language police fined the head of the establishment for offering menus in English. The victim of the coffee spill has been out sick and reports suggest she’ll undergo through the language test once she returns back to work.
Earlier this summer, a customer at a Narvesen convenience store threatened to sue the company after its employee allegedly refused to offer service in Russian. He asked a question about the cell phone card in Russian, the young woman who works at Narvesen later said. “I asked if he could repeat his questions in Latvian,” she said. The man got angry, called her names in a language she didn’t understand, but apparently knew well enough to understand the naughty bits. His wife allegedly said that you cannot work in customer service not being able to speak Russian.
Let’s face it. The overall culture of politeness and common courtesy is basically non-existent here. You don’t even have to venture into the realm of the customer service. It’s everywhere. An old woman whined for good half hour on a trolleybus, demanding the driver stop the trolleybus and open the window because it was too hot. A friend of mine made a mistake on a tram of speaking a foreign language too loudly on the phone. A group of 20-somethings ethnic Latvians mocked the foreign language.
The customer service in Latvia especially bad. People behind the counter are often rude, especially when it comes to the language. Granted, it’s better than it was after the fall of the Soviet Union, but it still doesn’t reach the levels one would like. Often, you ask for help and it seems you’re bothering a customer service representative from chatting with his colleagues. The examples are too many to name. Add the sheer rudeness on top of the ethnic sensitivities and you’ve got yourself a bitter cocktail of stories like the ones above.
Echoing Eric’s comments, these stories are not about the language issues, they’re not about Russians and Latvians. It’s about the lack of culture.
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