Language, faith and belonging before modern national movements

Belonging had several meanings

To trace the development of Lithuanian and Latvian identities, begin by separating questions that modern national histories often combine: what language did someone use, which faith did they follow, what rights did their social position give them, and to whom did they owe political loyalty?

The surviving records illustrate why these questions cannot be answered from one label. Artūras Dubonis examines the changing uses of Lithuanian, Ruthenian, Polish and Latin in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Andrejs Plakans and Ineta Lipša show that German-language records could describe Latvian-speaking households in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. The language of a record and the language of the people recorded are different evidence.^[1][2]

The Grand Duchy: a multilingual political setting

Dubonis’s study addresses a contested question: what “official” or “state” language means when applied to the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Grand Duchy. He argues that spoken and written uses varied with the setting and changed over time. His examples include government, courts, towns and religious life.^[1]

For this introduction, the useful conclusion is limited. A Ruthenian legal record does not by itself demonstrate that all the people involved spoke Ruthenian at home. Nor can the use of Polish or Latin in one setting, by itself, determine every aspect of a person’s allegiance. Dubonis’s discussion shows why the function of the particular text needs investigation before a broader claim about identity is made.^[1]

Faith and the growth of written languages

Religious publication created different settings for Lithuanian and Latvian writing. Dini describes Lithuanian Protestant authors working in the Duchy of Prussia and Catholic and Reformed publication in the Grand Duchy. The 1547 catechism associated with Martynas Mažvydas belongs to that wider history of religious writing, not to a newly created Lithuanian nation-state.^[3]

For Latvian, Dini discusses a Catholic catechism printed in Vilnius in 1585 and a Lutheran catechism published in 1586, followed by other religious translations and works on the language. His account also distinguishes the Catholic tradition in Latgale from the Lutheran setting elsewhere in the Latvian language area. These are differences within a language’s history, not a reason to assume one unchanging religious identity for all its speakers.^[3]

Latvian-speaking communities across provincial boundaries

Plakans and Lipša describe Latvian-speaking populations in Livland, Courland and western districts of Vitebsk province around the beginning of the nineteenth century. They distinguish landholding and confessional settings across those areas. The population they study did not live inside an already existing Latvian republic.^[2]

The same study explains a practical problem for historians and family-history researchers. Until late in the nineteenth century, much local population documentation in the Baltic provinces was written in German. Fiscal household lists were made to enumerate people for taxation; their categories were not designed to record every personal relationship or a modern declaration of national identity.^[2]

The nineteenth century: evidence from personal choices

Jurgita Ūsaitytė’s study of Lithuanian personal songbooks offers another kind of evidence. People copied songs and poems into notebooks that could serve leisure, education and social life. In the nineteenth-century examples she studies, these collections also reveal choices about language and cultural affiliation.^[4]

Some notebooks combined Lithuanian texts with Polish or Russian material. A name written in a Polish form or in Cyrillic could coexist with a predominantly Lithuanian collection. Ūsaitytė treats such evidence in its social and educational context. It would be too simple to turn a spelling choice into a complete statement of someone’s national identity.^[4]

From cultural affiliation to national programmes

In his study of the early Young Latvians, Ivars Ijabs describes activists who sought Latvian cultural equality within a society shaped by Baltic German privilege. He stresses their interaction with other cultures, including the models they borrowed as well as the hierarchy they opposed. A national programme was being argued for; it was not simply an unchanged medieval identity entering print.^[5]

These examples do not supply a single birth date for either people. They show why a history of identity needs several kinds of evidence and why an early written language, a noble political community and a modern national movement should not be treated as identical subjects.

Continue with national movements and the declarations of 1918, or return to the published history guide.