19th-Century Lithuanians Who Smuggled Books to Save Their Language

My grandmother was born in the 1920s in Western Belarus - Belarussian only became an official language and started being used in higher education again after Western Belarus was annexed to the Belarussian SSR after the end of WWII. In her town most people spoke Belarussian and few were literate in Polish. This was the case for most of Western Belarus, but the literary Belarussian language was only taught at the primary school level (in those towns that were fortunate enough to have schools), and there were very few Belarussian books published (to place this in context, some of the first books printed in a Slavic language were in Belarussian in the early 16th century). The literacy policies of Belarussian SSR is what revived the Belarussian language.

What has happened after the fall of the Soviet Union is Lukashenko's government pursuing a policy of suppressing Belarussian as an official language in favor of Russian. Recently this has started to become a bigger issue of dissatisfaction in the country.

My mom went to school before 'multiculturalism' was a thing, and was beaten by the teachers for speaking Ukrainian anywhere on the school grounds. And of course residential schools are a more known and somewhat more extreme example of the attempts to create homogeneous culture in Canada in the mid 20th century.

Nearly every (large) nation on earth has done similar things.

No, it's the nature of old empires. All large empires have eradicated - or tried to eradicate - minorities at one point or the other. Not through genocide mind you - you don't have to destroy the genetic inheritance. It's sufficient to destroy cultural inheritance and implant the cultural identity of the master. Language is one of the strongest markers of cultural identity and thus it's understandable why it would be one of the things on the 'hit list' - and literature especially. Since we don't have an oral tradition anymore, destroying books effectively would have destroyed the cultural inheritance in a generation.

Even Denmark quite forcefully tried to "civilize" Greenlanders in the 20th century with very bad mental health results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...

Here are just a few examples:

> In the later 19th century, virtually all teaching in the schools of Wales was in English, even in areas where the pupils barely understood English. Some schools used the Welsh Not, a piece of wood, often bearing the letters "WN", which was hung around the neck of any pupil caught speaking Welsh. The pupil could pass it on to any schoolmate heard speaking Welsh, with the pupil wearing it at the end of the day being given a beating. [1]

> Francization is also a designation applied to a number of ethnic assimilation policies implemented by French authorities from the French Revolution to present. These policies aimed to impose or to maintain the dominance of French language (which at this time was still a minority language in the numerical sense, despite being the prestige language of France and an increasingly important vernacular for writing, with the decline of Latin) and culture by encouraging or compelling people of other ethnic groups to adopt them, and thereby developing a French identity, at the expense of their existing identity. Coupled with this policy was the deliberate suppression of minority languages. Quickly after the end of the Ancien Régime, the new revolutionary government adopted a policy of promotion of French as a unifying and modernizing language, simultaneously denigrating the status of minority languages as bulwarks of feudalism, Church control of the state, and backwardness in general. In less than a year after coming to power (1792), the Committee for Public Instruction mandated that the newly expanded public education would be buttressed by the sending of French-speaking teachers to areas that spoke other languages. The 19th century saw this programme, and similar initiatives and wider cultural prorogatives, achieve many of its intended aims: the French language became much more expansive among the population, and by the 1860s, nearly 80 percent of the national population were able to speak French. [2]

> The programme of Italianization was particularly forcefully applied in schools, aiming at the destruction of the German school system. As of 1928, Italian had become the only language of instruction in 760 South Tyrolean classes, affecting over 360 schools and 30,000 pupils. Likewise, German Kindergarten were required to use Italian, while substitutes were forced to shut down. German teachers were systematically dismissed on the grounds of "insufficient didactics", or transferred to the south, from where Italian teachers were recruited instead. Degrees from Austrian or German universities became valid only through an additional stay of one year at an Italian university. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francization [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italianization_of_South_Tyrol