Your post is riddled with serious errors.

"When Latvia achieved independence in the 1990s it quickly began to marginalize the ethnic Russian population that had settled here, giving citizenship to anyone who would claim purely Latvia ethnicity..."

Citizenship was not and is not based on ethnicity. Those ethnic Russians who held Latvian citizenship prior to the occupation and their descendants received citizenship without the need for naturalization or Latvian language skills. Others have to naturalize, and well over 100 thousand people have done so. There are even some ethnic Latvians who do not have citizenship -- ethnicity is immaterial to the process, and the naturalization reuirements are comparatively liberal.

"Is there much of a difference between the two languages? No. Latvians understand Russians fluently, and certainly ethnic-Russians living here understand Latvian. I have a good background in Slavic languages..."

Latvian is a Baltic language, not a Slavic language. If the difference were so slight, Russophone non-citizens would have no difficulty learning Latvian and naturalizing, no? There are many Russians living here who don't speak the language, and the percentage of Latvians fluent in Russian is in decline. When independence was restored, only about one in five non-Latvians could speak Latvian. More than half can now. That's a sign of the language policies' success, not an indication that "Latvians haven't helped things." Even now, however, the linguistic environment is far from ideal -- some nurses were recently fined for their lack of Latvian language skills, for instance. Latvians have the right to expect service in Latvian in Latvia, especially in institutions like hospitals or police stations.

The education reform does indeed call for an increased percentage of classes to be taught in Latvian -- but there are several different tracks in the system, some of which provide for plenty of instruction in Russian in minority schools (and Latvia also provides state supported education for the Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Roma minorities). Most Russian schools aren't actually "ethnic Russian schools" but relics of the Soviet era. It is quite natural that some would be closed -- not a few Russophones prefer to educate their children in the Latvian language. Latvia has very high inter-ethnic marriage rates, and the vast majority of mixed Russian-Latvian couples choose to send their children to Latvian-language schools, for example.

One of the primary purposes of our language policies was to reverse the asymmetrical bilingualism that was forced upon Latvia by the Soviets and was leading to the death of the language. If most everyone can speak Russian but most Russophones do not use Latvian -- and they made up a majority in most urban areas by the time independence was restored -- language death is imminent. Fortunately, the policies you say aren't helpful have been largely effective, and most younger Russophones are now fluent in Latvian.

http://lettonica.blogspot.com/

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