Learning and teaching Estonian as a foreign language is in the spotlight. The last article I read said that every subject teacher must now also become a teacher of Estonian as a foreign language. In that connection, I want to introduce one aspect of language teaching that, in my view, has not been addressed at all. It concerns spoken communication and colloquial language.

People who have learned Estonian as a foreign language often say that they did study it in school, but still do not really understand much when people speak to them, whether in a store, a restaurant, when interacting with coworkers or even in the classroom. How can that be? It should not be a problem, should it?

First, the vocabulary of everyday spoken language is simple, not very varied and limited. The same applies to the vocabulary of everyday public interaction, whether it is the names of goods in a store or dishes in a restaurant. Even in school, the number of concepts and terms being learned at one time is fairly small.

Second, the morphology and syntax of spoken Estonian and standard written Estonian are similar. Spoken language uses the same case and verb endings and markers as written language and sentence elements are formed in the same way. There are, of course, differences, but they are few and also appear in more informal written texts, for example on social media.

Third, spoken communication uses many simple and compound sentences and few complex subordinate clauses.

So what is the issue? The answer is simple. Those affected do not know the language of spoken dialogue as a distinct language register and do not know its key characteristics. There are quite a few of those characteristics, but I will mention only some that affect the use and understanding of language in spontaneous communication.

One issue is sentence boundaries. Everyone who has heard speech in an unfamiliar foreign language knows how it can seem like one continuous, uniform stream of words.

In speech, there is no punctuation. Sentences are separated primarily by intonation. The problem, however, is that intonational boundaries are often vague and in longer stretches of speech the speaker may run several sentences together into one stream. The listener therefore has to divide the flow of speech into meaningful and grammatical units. But that requires knowing the words and here three major problems arise.

First, words in spoken language are often shortened. This can happen to any word, but there are a few dozen very common words that are shortened most often and that therefore cause the most problems. These include several adverbs and conjunctions, for example siis becoming s, aga becoming a, kui becoming ku, ei becoming i; verb forms such as ütles becoming üts and olnud becoming old; and the tens-numbers in the nominative case, for example kakskümmend becoming kakskend.

Second, words in spoken language are often pronounced together. Shortened word forms are especially likely to merge, but here too it is possible to identify a couple dozen especially common word pairs. These include, for example, ei ole becoming iole, ma ei becoming mai, ei no becoming eino, nii et becoming niet and ta on becoming tan.

Third, particles are extremely common in spoken language. Particles are words that do not function as sentence elements and have therefore generally remained outside the focus of language teaching. Yet they are especially common in spoken communication. Of the 25 most frequent words in spoken dialogue, 15 are words that function only as particles, such as jah, mhmh, noh and no, or words for which being a particle is one of several functions, such as et, see, aga, si(i)s, nagu and või. Using and understanding particles is a crucial foundation of all spoken communication.

For example, in conversation a person does not answer a yes-or-no question with a full sentence like in a school textbook, but with a particle. Yet the speaker must know when to answer with jah and when with jaa or mhmh and must understand what the other person is trying to convey through that choice of word. They must know when to say aa in response to new information and when to say ahah or ahaa — and what their conversation partner is trying to communicate through that choice. Or what to expect when the other person begins answering a question with the word et or no.

And finally, spontaneous conversation is full of searching and stumbling, expressed for example by noh or nagu. These are not filler words. Speakers must produce speech and understand what is being said very quickly, at a rate of 2–3 words per second. Carrying on a conversation without such searching particles would mean that we would have to prepare our sentences in advance and memorize them.

In sum, spoken communication requires effort. At the same time, the relatively small number of important words and their uses can be learned fairly easily. But only if they are taught. That means teacher training should go far enough that teaching spoken Estonian and the structure of spoken dialogue becomes part of the university curriculum for all foreign-language teachers. And if we follow the grand idea of politicians and officials, then it should become part of all teacher training. True, there is one problem. Where will universities find the lecturers and salary funding for that instruction when politicians do not care one bit about university lecturers' pay?

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