Evicting the Speaking Subject: A Critique of Latvian Concepts of Language

This paper highlights some peculiarities of the nation-language conflation in Latvian linguistics and traces their evolution. Treating language as the perfect structure consolidating ideal speakers, linguists perceive native speakers as a homogenous community whose task is to reproduce the normative language structure. Speaking subjects are denied social agency, and divergence from the norm in communication is treated as an error. The paper argues that empirically observed language use can be explained by taking into account the pragmatic intentions of speaking subjects.