The Paradox of National Language Acquisition: Russian Speakers' Labor Market Positions in Estonia

This paper analyzes the changes in the labor market positions of Soviet-era Russian-speaking immigrants and their descendants in Estonia in 1992-2008. More specifically, it explains how the knowledge of Estonian connects with evaluations of changes of market positions. The Estonian case shows that the language policy intervention undertaken in the context of a fundamental transformation of the market structure in the 1990s paradoxically yielded results contrary to the objectives pursued by the language policy. As it turns out, a segregation strategy is successful in terms of market position maintenance or improvement, whereas acculturation strategy (learning Estonian) worsens rather than improves job opportunities.