A scene from Tallinn

[bellinghman]

There we were, sitting in the Café Mademoiselle in Tallinn Old Town, drinking our coffees and browsing the web, when we noted a couple attempting to order. Since pretty much everyone working in the Old Town speaks English (Estonian is a nice language, most closely related to Finnish, but the number of fluent speakers worldwide is probably less than two million), that is what this couple was doing. However, they were obviously having a vocabulary problem of some form.

And then the waitress switched language.

To Russian.

Suddenly everything went much better, since the couple was Russian, and the waitress, an Estonian of an age to have been educated while Estonia was still part of the USSR, sounded pretty much as fluent in it as they were.

I did find it interesting that the switch only occurred when the waitress had decided that English wasn't going to cut it, and that it was her rather than the Russians who did so. Given history, I can imagine that starting off in Russian in Estonia would invite a certain hostility.

Comments

[uitlander.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

I observed something very similar in Hungary 10 years ago. There was a block of literature I needed to read that was only available in Russian. The museum curator I was working with finally looked over my shoulder and sight read/translated what I had been struggling with. Apparently everyone in the old Soviet block was forced to learn Russian at school, adn many of the lessons were nly given in Russian. They do not like to talk about this, and in general will deny that they know any Russian unless using it is the only option.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I suspected something along those lines.

There's also the way that Estonia had quite a lot of Russian immigration encouraged: many of those people are still there, and with some second generation by now, they won't want to 'go home'.

[vatine]

I suspect the Swedish-speaking minority in Estonia is now down to about 0 (there was an island off the coast where they spoke Swedish as their native language, a fairly archaic dialect, with heavy Finn-Ugric influences).

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

There were supposedly about 300 back in 2000, but yes, that's not many compared to the numbers supposedly there before WWII.

If I'd been an Estlandssvenskar when the Soviets took over, I too would have seriously considered emigrating to a country where they spoke (something pretty close to) my language instead of that weird Estonian, and which looked to be staying out of the conflict. And afterwards, I probably wouldn't have wanted to return just to live under Stalin.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Yes - I've run into this in Hungary also and Czech rep, and Poland. No one thanked you for speaking Russian (I was accompanied by a Russian speaker in the first two.) think it's pretty universal for the old Soviet bloc except Russia itself..
Mind you trying German goes down equally well though many get it esp in Budapest which is not that far from the Austrian border:)
The new generation all speak completely fluent english of course.