ABSTRACT

The status, role, and place of the Russian language started changing radically in Lithuania toward the end of the twentieth century. The change began under Soviet rule, when an amendment including Lithuanian alongside Russian as the co-official language of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania was added to the Soviet Constitution in 1988. Since the restoration of the independent Republic of Lithuania in 1990, Lithuanian has been the only official state language in a de jure and de facto capacity. With these changes, the status of Russian has altered significantly, and rather than the dominant language of a political entity of which Lithuania was a part, it is a heritage language for people of Russian ethnicity and other ethnic groups of Russian speakers, and a foreign language for other residents of Lithuania. The result has been a functional redistribution of the languages in Lithuania as well as changes in their higher or lower ranking in the country's linguistic environment.