In a couple of months, it will be 31 years since you became head of what was formerly the Language Inspectorate and is now the Language Board. You have served through 16 governments. But by your own account, it all began when then-Education Minister Peeter Kreitzberg summoned you and proposed that you take on language policy and head the Language Inspectorate. He reportedly said he needed someone who had ties to neither the Tallinn nor the Tartu language establishment. Looking back, can you explain what Kreitzberg might have meant and why that was important?

For well over a century, it seems to have been quite normal in the Estonian language community for linguists to be somewhat at odds with one another and to disagree. The year 1995 also began with some minor language disputes, both at the political level and over substantive issues. They started looking for someone who would be neutral on these matters.

I don't actually know exactly how Peeter Kreitzberg found me, because I was living and working in Kadrina at the time. I had already finished my career as a schoolteacher of Estonian language and literature and had also studied Finnish language, literature and culture in Finland, completing a microdegree in teaching Finnish at the University of Jyväskylä. At the time, though, I was working in the private sector at Kadrina EPT, a joint-stock company, where I was deputy chairman of the management board and assistant to the managing director.

I had put down roots in Kadrina and had no desire whatsoever to start commuting to Tallinn for work, but in his characteristically calm manner, Peeter Kreitzberg presented it to me as a fait accompli. He said I was needed, so I submitted my application to take up the position, was handed the keys to an office and an official car and told to start running the place. It was quite a daunting experience. The first few years were difficult.

You used the word "disputes." What were the language policy disputes about at the time?

As I recall, a lot of it was about money: how money earmarked for language-related issues should be spent, what it should be spent on and who should get it. That was the source of many of the disputes. If we look at government today — and not just in Estonia — fundamentally, nothing has changed. The only thing you could say is that accounting for money has become a little more precise these days.

The disputes were more about the fact that, in the mid-1990s, various sources of aid funding were beginning to open up and many foreign embassies were willing to spend their countries' taxpayers' money on integration-related issues in Estonia. That was largely what it was about.

You have taught Estonian and Finnish, but you were actually trained as an Estonian-language teacher for Russian-language schools.

That's right, and it happened completely unexpectedly for me. After high school, I actually began studying to become a physical education teacher. When Brezhnev died, all the young men who were supposed to receive deferments in order to pursue higher education were drafted into the Soviet Army at the end of 1982. After serving for two years in the Far North as an amphibious tank commander in the naval infantry, I came back no longer suited to physical education or running and had to figure out what to do.

By chance, in the lobby of the main building of what is now Tallinn University, I ran into August Undusk, then dean of the language faculty. He noticed a dejected-looking young man and asked what I was doing there. I told him I wanted to study. After returning from the military, I spoke Estonian with a strong Russian accent and he saw in me the potential to become an Estonian-language teacher at a Russian-language school. At the end of December, he arranged a new set of entrance exams just for me and that is how I ended up training as an Estonian-language teacher for Russian-language schools.

I only ever did my teaching practicum at a Russian-language school, though, because while at university I met a young woman from Kadrina who was studying to become an English teacher and we got married. Today is our 40th wedding anniversary and we're going to celebrate this evening.

Congratulations!

We were then assigned to Kadrina, which is how we ended up at Kadrina High School: my wife as an English teacher and me as an Estonian teacher.

If there is a meaningful comparison to be made, what did it mean to be an Estonian-language teacher at a Russian-language school in the second half of the 1980s and what does it mean today?

Back then, Estonian as a subject had a completely marginal role in Russian-language schools. It was very much peripheral. Today, it is one of the most important subjects, receiving a great deal of attention from the state, the Language Board, the Ministry of Education and local governments.

Estonian was taught back then and it was compulsory in Russian-language schools, but the learning outcomes — that by the time students graduated, a young person would be able to speak at least some Estonian — were clearly not being achieved. Even then, there were many teachers teaching Estonian who did not actually know the language themselves. That may be one reason students did not learn Estonian. Nor were ethnic Estonian teachers of Estonian particularly welcome in Russian-language schools. Russian-language schools existed in their own kind of pocket universe and the Estonian state did not have much involvement in them in the 1980s.

If we read the Language Board's reports today, however, we can see that we are still struggling with the same problem. There are still teachers who try to teach subjects in Estonian, but you have established that they do not have C1- or B2-level proficiency in Estonian.

The legal turning point came in December 2022 when the Riigikogu adopted a decision to begin the transition to Estonian-language education in earnest.

Just to clarify, you joined the Language Board in 1995. So it took that long...

It took that long. The first Riigikogu-level decision to transition to Estonian-language education was actually adopted back in 1993. It remained on the books and perhaps someone hoped it would be a self-fulfilling decision. The deadline was set for 2000, by which time Russian-language schools were supposed to become Estonian-language schools, but nothing changed. As the deadline approached, it was postponed again and again. The transition began in upper secondary schools in 2011, which, figuratively speaking, meant building the chimney and the roof while saying that whatever happened underneath was none of our concern.

It was not until 2022 that a decision was finally reached to genuinely begin the transition to Estonian-language education in kindergartens and basic schools as well. In 2024, new teacher qualification requirements largely took effect. Until then, teachers had been subject to Estonian-language proficiency requirements under the Language Act, but language proficiency was not part of the professional qualification requirements for teachers. The Language Board carried out inspections and imposed fines and penalty payments, but school principals had no grounds to replace teachers because they lacked language proficiency. We applied consistent pressure, but because language proficiency was not part of the qualification requirements, the situation was rather absurd: even a teacher who did not know Estonian formally met the qualification requirements.

Since 2024, however, a teacher who does not know Estonian no longer meets the qualification requirements and a school principal may not hire such a person even if they have a doctorate.

Our latest supervision data shows that among teachers in general education schools who are required to have C1-level Estonian — teachers of Estonian and teachers who teach their subjects in Estonian — the figure is 97 percent. The situation is a little more complicated in kindergartens: about 95 percent of kindergarten teachers formally meet the Estonian-language proficiency requirements, but among assistant teachers the figure is somewhere around 50 to 60 percent. There is still a great deal of work to be done with assistant teachers in kindergartens.

One important factor that has had a significant impact on education in Ida-Viru County is the salary component. If you meet the qualification requirements and know Estonian, you get paid more. That has brought hundreds of teachers to Ida-Viru County from elsewhere.

Yesterday, I spoke with a senior official in Ida-Viru County who said they were having trouble finding people with good Estonian skills to work in municipal institutions because everyone wants to go work at a school. He criticized the Education Ministry and the Language Board over this, but from our perspective and from the perspective of education, it is actually an extremely positive development that schools in Ida-Viru County have become attractive workplaces that people want to join. I can't say how long they will stay, but right now it isn't very difficult to find Estonian-speaking teachers in Ida-Viru County — you could perhaps even say it is more difficult in Tallinn.

You are in your final months as director of the Language Board. Are you a leader or a manager?

Neither. In an agency with fewer than 20 employees, the person in charge can't be the kind of executive you find at a large organization.

Someone who goes off to play golf during the day.

Who counts the employees in the morning, then spends a little time contemplating things and puttering around.

In a small agency, the person in charge must above all be a partner to all the employees. They are responsible for ensuring that employees have the resources to do their jobs as well as possible. In a small agency, if a link in the chain breaks somewhere, the person in charge has to be the plug or stopgap capable of filling in.

When executives are recruited for many large organizations, you often hear that they don't actually need to know the field particularly well; they just need to understand general management principles. And if they can give the selection committee a polished, fluent explanation of matrix management, they will most likely get the job.

I think that even at larger organizations, the person in charge could be someone who has risen through the ranks. At the same time, when someone has come up through the organization, it is difficult for them to make major changes because they are, so to speak, one of the gang. I was brought in from outside.

As long as you weren't from Tartu or Tallinn.

More or less from somewhere in between. And quite a lot of changes followed. But changes are only worth making when they are needed. When I look back over 30 years and, as a citizen, assess the changes that have been made in our political and administrative landscape, I have often been left with the impression that changes are made simply for the sake of making changes. And even 10 years after those changes were made, no one can quite explain why they were made.

Some of your current colleagues at the Language Board have been with you throughout all these decades. Looking back at the circumstances in which the Board — previously the Inspectorate — had to operate: a law was passed in 1993, but there were no implementing regulations or measures to put it into practice. Your job is to monitor compliance with the law. But on what basis? How do you motivate your colleagues and yourself to approach the work seriously and passionately, while remaining calm at the same time? It would be very difficult to characterize you as someone who gets agitated, shouts, insults people or throws things.

There's an interesting point about insults and shouting. The last time I applied for the position, the selection committee asked me what would prompt me to submit my resignation before the end of my term. I thought about it for a moment and said: someone raising their voice at me. I don't think I could tolerate that. Fortunately, that hasn't happened in the past four and a half years.

What about before that?

Not before that either. Perhaps my own attitude has helped prevent it.

As for the situation with legislation, the problem has been that different laws have spoken different languages. The requirements imposed on teachers under the Language Act have remained more or less the same since the 1989 Language Act. The contradiction was that we monitored compliance with language proficiency requirements under the Language Act, while education legislation — the Basic Schools and Upper Secondary Schools Act, the Preschool Child Care Institutions Act and the Vocational Educational Institutions Act — did not include those requirements among teachers' qualification requirements until the 2022 amendment.

So there were effectively two separate areas: we monitored compliance with language requirements, but those requirements were not part of teachers' professional qualifications.

The same situation exists in the taxi industry, which is discussed a great deal. The language requirement for taxi drivers is explicitly set out in a government regulation issued under the Language Act: taxi drivers must have B1-level proficiency in Estonian. But the entire taxi industry operates under the Public Transport Act and taxi driver service cards are also issued under that act. The Public Transport Act, however, does not require taxi drivers to know Estonian in order to be issued a service card.

That means someone can obtain a taxi driver service card — in other words, the right to provide the service — without knowing Estonian and the language requirement only comes into play once they actually start providing the service. We can check their Estonian proficiency only on the basis of a complaint submitted to us after it becomes apparent in the course of providing the service that the taxi driver does not know Estonian.

So these laws are not aligned. They were aligned for a short period — from the end of 2014 until March 22, 2016, if I remember correctly. During that period, taxi drivers were also required to know Estonian under the Public Transport Act.

And it was remarkable: when reports began appearing in the media that the government was going to introduce language proficiency requirements for taxi drivers in order to obtain a service card, taxi drivers began attending language courses very diligently. There were long lines outside the Language Board's door, with taxi drivers coming in to receive compliance orders. Once a driver had received an order and attended language courses, the state reimbursed the cost of the courses. So hundreds — perhaps even more than a thousand — taxi drivers came in to receive orders.

But when the requirement was abolished, taxi drivers lost interest in learning Estonian. Because once you already have the job and have your service card, there isn't much incentive to learn the language. Again, this is a discrepancy between the Language Act and sector-specific legislation. And there are several other areas where the two could be brought into alignment.

How can you talk about all this so calmly? Because if we had implemented all these laws consistently with one another since 1989 or 1993 — and it is now 2026 — perhaps we could simply shut down the Language Board altogether.

That's an idea I already put forward in my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote in 2001–2002. I offered a kind of projection that if the transition to Estonian as the language of instruction proceeded as it could and teachers learned Estonian properly, then by 2012–2013 the Language Board would probably no longer have any work to do in the field of education. That was my hypothesis.

But that hypothesis came crashing down because it took another couple of decades for the transition to happen in that way.

These are political decisions and I don't want to criticize any individual politician. When it comes to the transition to Estonian as the language of instruction, it isn't possible to single out any one political party and say they are to blame, because since 1993, virtually every party on Estonia's political landscape has dealt with the issue and for one reason or another, the process was never carried through to completion in the way it was in 2022. And even then, it was the result of cooperation among several parties.

I very much like the fact that there isn't a single party that can say, "I did this." Several parties and education ministers contributed to bringing us to where we are. And yes, it is difficult right now for teachers, parents, schools and school principals, but we will get through these four or five years and I believe that from 2030, when the transition should logically and legally be complete, our education landscape will look completely different from the way it did when I started this job in 1995.

But to paraphrase: no party that has been represented in parliament and served in a governing coalition can say it has done everything possible to ensure that the laws are aligned with one another and that it has done everything it could to protect the Estonian language.

Unfortunately, no party can truly say that because legislation is always some form of compromise. One of the Language Board's statutory duties is to propose amendments to legislation and I have made such proposals based on what we have learned through our supervisory work. Some have become law and some have not.

But history isn't over yet. Those proposals are still sitting safely in one drawer or another. At some point, they will undoubtedly come out again and become relevant.

Let's open the top drawer of those proposals. What is Ilmar Tomusk's most pressing proposal for a new law or an amendment to an existing one? What could be done?

The top item that most recently crossed my desk — in the sense that I had to explain the relevant legislation to some colleagues — concerns Estonian-language proficiency among local council members.

We know that under the Local Government Organization Act, local council meetings must be conducted in Estonian. That would seem to imply that council members should know Estonian. From 1996 to 2001, the law did in fact include an Estonian-language proficiency requirement for council members. Initially, it was established under the Language Act and later under the Local Government Council Election Act. For various reasons, those requirements were repealed at the end of November 2001.

That means we are now in a situation where a council meeting must be conducted in Estonian and a council member would seemingly have to be able to do their work in Estonian, but there is no actual requirement for them to know the language.

If I put myself in the shoes of a council chair who has to ensure that the meeting is conducted in Estonian, while knowing that more than half the council members do not speak Estonian, then how are they supposed to do that? There has been a great deal of debate about this. About four years ago, this draft legislation was more or less on the verge of being completed and nearly made it out of the drawer, but for various reasons it went back in.

Some council chairs are in an extremely difficult position because they know they have to chair the meeting in Estonian. They are not allowed to conduct it in Russian because the law does not provide for that. A few years ago, I watched a council meeting in Ida-Viru County and in a way I actually felt sorry for both the council chair and the council members. If a council member wanted to say something but did not know Estonian, they would start speaking Russian and the Russian-speaking council chair would turn off the microphone and say that they were not allowed to speak in Russian.

We are in a somewhat schizophrenic situation if the meeting has to be held in Estonian. As a politician, a council member could of course be expected to understand that if they allow themselves to be elected to a council, they should also know Estonian. But in some municipalities, Estonian is simply not considered that important — other things matter more.

I would like to see a language proficiency requirement for council members restored to election law in one form or another. Not as a specific level such as B1 or C1, but as a description of what a council member should be able to do in Estonian: meet with voters, read draft legislation, give presentations and so on. When standing for election, the candidate would sign a declaration saying they are able to do those things.

No one would need to formally assess their language proficiency; they would assess it themselves. If they are elected and can manage, everything is fine. If they are elected but cannot manage, the National Electoral Committee could intervene because the candidate provided false information about themselves when standing for election. A council member still needs some kind of benchmark — if they are elected to a council, there are certain skills they need to have and they need some basis for assessing whether they possess them.

What would you pull out of the drawer next?

One proposal concerns those same taxi drivers. As I see it, if one law says that someone providing a service must know Estonian while another law effectively says they do not have to, then the two laws should be brought into alignment.

When the language requirement was added to the requirements for obtaining a service card back in 2014, the main reason was that it would help improve service quality. And it really did.

Today, when you order a taxi, communication generally takes place through an app and passengers can get most of the essential consumer information through the app. But situations can arise in traffic and public transportation that cannot be resolved through an app where the driver needs to be able to understand traffic signs and other traffic-control devices or where a passenger has a question during the ride.

It does not have to be a question about folklore, as people sometimes joke — no one needs to discuss Tammsaare with their taxi driver. But dangerous situations can arise in traffic, accidents can happen and in those cases a taxi driver absolutely has to be able to communicate with the customer. B1 is more or less the optimal level for that and that is also the case in many countries. So this requirement really should be included in the Public Transport Act, so that the sector-specific law and the Language Act are aligned.

There are also provisions in the Language Act itself that could be clarified. Section 16, which concerns public information, contains a subsection dealing with trademarks. It is a relatively complicated legal issue, but the subsection is worded so that if a trademark contains important information, information in Estonian must also be provided. Yet we do not know and cannot tell from the law where that Estonian information has to appear, how much of it there has to be or how visible it must be.

Businesses are resourceful. If there is a large foreign-language trademark containing important information and the Estonian-language information is placed somewhere the customer cannot see it, then formally the legal requirement has still been met.

That is one provision that should be clarified and adjusted so that when information in Estonian is required by law, it is clearly defined where it must appear and how visible it has to be.

How effective do you consider the latest amendment to the Language Act, which does not allow dubbed films to be shown in movie theaters? The law also applies, for example, to the ETV+ television channel, which is supposed to show films in their original language with subtitles.

The purpose of the provision concerning movie theaters is first and foremost to reduce the amount of Russian heard in public spaces and increase the amount of Estonian. In that sense, it is a very good provision.

When I think about how many complaints we have received about movie theaters, there have actually been relatively few. I recently counted them up and over 10 years I believe we received around 30 complaints about missing translations or translation quality. So it is not a large number.

The reason this provision was put into law was therefore not so much the number of complaints as the aim of making the public space more Estonian-speaking. Even when a Russian-speaking person goes to the movies, they should not necessarily hear the familiar Russian language there; they can read Russian in the subtitles instead. What they hear should preferably be the original language or Estonian.

We have been talking indirectly about Russian, but when we move around Tallinn, in the taxi industry, for example, we are increasingly encountering service that is more likely to be in English or even a third language, with the person providing the service having relatively little command of any language we might understand.

Let's say they speak another language. There have also been taxi drivers who have undergone language inspections who don't speak any of the three so-called local languages — Estonian, Russian or English. Dealing with them can be relatively difficult. If they have to get someone to their destination — and the same applies to couriers — but they don't know the Latin alphabet and have difficulty reading street names and there is no Estonian-language proficiency requirement, then, particularly with couriers, there have been cases where food has been delivered to the wrong place or the courier hasn't been able to ask how to get through the gate or how to get up to the fourth floor. If they can't ask, the pizza might get cold. We have received complaints like that.

A minimum level of language proficiency should certainly be ensured when providing a service.

Let's look at it from the other side. Highly qualified specialists come here and we don't impose a local-language requirement on them because they probably speak English at C2 level, even though they themselves aren't from an English-speaking country. They're highly qualified specialists and we want to make exceptions for them. That, in turn, has led to situations where a restaurant might say that service is provided in English because, after all, everyone speaks English.

Especially after Estonia joined the European Union, many service providers said that we're in the European Union now and everything is in English. In reality, even if a restaurant kitchen employs a highly qualified specialist — a chef who has come from another country — information in Estonian must still be provided when offering the service.

The fact that a highly qualified specialist is exempt from the language proficiency requirement, or that there is a time limit — for example, if they have been in Estonia for less than five years, the language requirement does not apply — does not mean that an Estonian should not be able to receive information in Estonian in every situation. That absolutely must be ensured.

Even in workplaces that employ foreign-language-speaking highly qualified specialists, the Language Act explicitly states that everyone has the right to receive work-related information in Estonian. The law does not specify exactly how that must be ensured, but it must be ensured.

With doctors, we have a two-sided situation. On the one hand, there is a new generation coming out of university who have successfully completed medical school and their residencies, but then find themselves in a situation where they have to speak Russian with a patient and don't know the language. On the other hand, there are staff shortages in certain positions and people from third countries would be willing to come here to work. They have the appropriate training and qualifications but don't speak Estonian, yet in Virumaa, for example, they could provide much-needed help in delivering medical care.

They can provide much-needed help, but doctors from third countries cannot simply come and work in Estonia — they have to pass a professional equivalency examination in Estonian. Unfortunately, we have also received complaints about doctors who have passed the equivalency examination in Estonian but still cannot function properly in the language. On paper, they have the necessary qualification and should be able to manage in Estonian, but they can't. In those cases, we have to issue an order requiring them to improve their Estonian.

In particularly serious cases where a doctor does not know the language at all — there was one case where a doctor who had passed the professional examination in Estonian failed the A2 language exam, meaning their language proficiency was very poor — it is first and foremost the employer's responsibility to ensure the required language proficiency. The language proficiency regulation clearly states that employers must ensure that employees who are required to know Estonian actually do. Employers definitely need to pay more attention to this.

The Language Board currently carries out as many inspections as we have time for after dealing with educational institutions. There can only be one top priority and for us that is education, followed by healthcare and social welfare. We regularly inspect the larger hospitals in Ida-Viru County, issue orders to doctors and also impose penalty payments. But first and foremost, it is the employer's responsibility: if an Estonian goes to see a doctor, whether in Sillamäe, Narva or Kohtla-Järve, they must be able to receive medical care in Estonian.

What we have discussed so far demonstrates that one of the hypotheses in Ilmar Tomusk's doctoral dissertation is not going to become reality anytime soon — namely, that the Language Board would no longer be needed.

It seems it is still needed, yes. The overall influence of foreign languages has changed over the decades. When I started working here, the influence of Russian was naturally very strong and Tallinn and many other cities were full of Russian-language signs. By the second half of the 1990s, those Russian-language signs had been taken down. At one point, Finnish-language signs began appearing in some parts of Tallinn. They were often incorrect, too, and we had to deal with them. My problem was that because I speak Finnish, I could tell whether something was written correctly or incorrectly. On the one hand, we issued orders requiring information to be added in Estonian, while on the other, I would offer a friendly suggestion that they correct their Finnish as well.

Now the pressure from English is quite strong. Of course, people tell us that everyone speaks English, so why are we coming along insisting on Estonian? But people who spend more time walking around the city, such as our inspectors, have started noticing public signs in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and perhaps some other languages as well. They are mostly at restaurants and other food establishments, but I don't know what they mean. I can't read Chinese characters or pictographic writing, I don't know Arabic and I have trouble with cuneiform as well. That means that, either now or looking five to 10 years ahead, we are not talking about English alone.

I was in Oxford a few years ago and its streetscape was extremely diverse and international. There were quite a lot of languages from the Middle East and Asia where I could tell they came from that part of the world, but I didn't even know which language I was looking at. If you consider the influence of the Chinese economy, for example, I have already noticed Chinese-language signs at the port of Helsinki. So other languages are becoming more prevalent as well and we cannot say that everyone speaks Chinese or Arabic.

As a customer, I have the right to understand the information being displayed to me in a public space. Perhaps a sign is advertising some kind of food or service, but perhaps it is calling for something I don't understand and that may not be consistent with accepted standards of conduct.

That is why we must consistently enforce what the Language Act says: foreign languages are allowed, but Estonian must always be there as well. We have to enforce that consistently or one day we will find ourselves facing a Tower of Babel on our streets, with dozens upon dozens of languages and no way of knowing what information is being displayed.

The Constitution says that everyone has the right to receive information intended for the public and I have the right to receive that information in Estonian. In Estonia, information must be available in Estonian. The business sector is so dynamic that by the time one of our inspectors makes their way from one end of Tallinn to the other and returns to where they started, there are already new businesses and new signs there. We have to start the work all over again because if we didn't, our city would be entirely dominated by foreign languages.

If you have time to write books while also running the Language Board, one might mischievously ask whether there is so little work at the agency or whether Ilmar Tomusk is simply that talented.

I have weekends and vacation time. Summer vacation has always been my most productive period. I recently had time off in July and that's when I worked on new books. I don't write books during working hours. That would be absolutely impossible — you could go crazy trying to write something sensible for a children's book amid everything going on in the document management system. So I write in the evenings, on weekends and during the summer. Of course, I would like to devote more time to writing. I have very little of it.

Just two more months to go.

I'm very envious of writers who describe their working day as getting up in the morning, drinking coffee, contemplating things, going for a walk and then sitting down to write for a while. Then they have lunch and take a nap. Sometimes I'd like to experience that kind of life as a full-time writer, too.

At the same time, when I think about the periods when I believe I've written my best books, remarkably enough, I've written them when things have been most stressful at work. For example, in 2024–2025, when we began very intensive inspections at Russian-language schools, my evenings and weekends were extremely productive in terms of writing books.

Perhaps it was a way of balancing the stress of work. At one moment, you feel like a very active public official; on the other hand, when I think about my readers, I'm happy to devote those few hours to them. Especially when one day you receive a letter from a parent saying their child never used to read books at all, but after the parent read one of my books aloud to them, the child started reading books independently. And I haven't received feedback like that from just one or 10 parents, but from dozens and dozens of them.

That is also borne out by the fact that Ilmar Tomusk is consistently among the top 10 authors receiving public lending right payments based on library loans. And when you have new works out during the year, Ilmar Tomusk's children's books also make the bestseller lists. It is a tribute to the Estonian language and a way of supporting and preserving correct and beautiful Estonian, specifically through children and young people.

A significant part of the key to ensuring the survival of the Estonian language, culture and nation certainly lies in Russian-language schools and in ensuring that our Russian-speaking young people learn Estonian, but the main responsibility rests with our own children. Mothers need to sing lullabies to their children in Estonian. Fathers and mothers need to read them quality children's books such as "Sipsik" and "Naksitrallid" — and perhaps occasionally some of my books as well, if they happen to come across them.

I particularly want to praise Estonia's elementary school teachers who do an enormous amount of valuable and important work to keep children engaged with books and the Estonian language. The groundwork and foundation for our children to grow up to be good Estonians with a strong command of the Estonian language are, of course, laid in kindergarten and the first years of school. After that, it becomes very difficult to change things. So reading habits and a love of the Estonian language and culture begin in kindergarten and elementary school. I think our early childhood and elementary school teachers do an excellent job in that respect.

Will the notorious artificial intelligence take your job away if some kind of automated contraption starts writing books? Will it eventually take the jobs of public officials who have to monitor what is going on around them? There are an enormous number of myths surrounding the subject.

There are plenty of myths, but I'm not afraid of AI. It certainly won't take writers' jobs away.

But what will it do to the Estonian language?

So far, its impact has been quite positive — provided AI works solely with a corpus of correct Estonian, meaning an Estonian-language corpus written by real people. But research shows that when AI starts using texts generated by AI, things begin to go off the rails. So with AI, it's very important for us to have the largest and highest-quality Estonian-language corpus possible. AI can certainly be helpful in many cases, but I don't think it will take writers' jobs away.

For public officials, it will probably change the work somewhat, but it won't eliminate their jobs.

Is Sergei Kraana [the pseudonym under which Tomusk wrote articles for Maaleht for years] still alive?

Let's put it this way: Sergei Kraana is dormant. He still exists and occasionally makes some public posts, but he isn't producing any new work at the moment.

Over your 31 years at the Language Board, have all the questions, problems and disputes been resolved with words or have you ever had to use the skills you learned practicing karate in your youth? Did you ever earn a belt?

I earned some kind of belt, but that was never an end in itself. The goal was to be healthy and strong. I've never had to use those skills in civilian life.

But as I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to serve for two years as a tank crewman in the Soviet naval infantry and there were times when, to get out of certain situations more successfully, you had to resort to what an old acquaintance of mine called "rice-paddy techniques." Those skills did come in handy, although even there I tried to resolve most problems with words. But when words weren't enough, it was customary there to settle matters in other ways as well. Fortunately, I've never had any need for that elsewhere.

If you have command of words and ideas, it is possible to preserve the Estonian language, despite the extraordinarily and inexplicably long delays we have discussed on this program in enforcing Estonian-language requirements.

Estonians are calm by nature and don't rush into many things. But once they set their minds to something, they get it done, as we can see now. We're getting this done and it will certainly benefit society.

Yes, words are very important. As one old and wise book says, by your words you will be justified and by your words you will be condemned. So you always have to think about what you say. Don't say something until you've thought about what it means.

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