If the Seimas were to adopt such amendments to the State Language Law, they would enter into force from April 2025.
The initiator of the changes, Dalia Asanavičiūtė, claims that the obligation to speak to customers in Lithuanian would apply only to employees directly serving them.
“If a person repairs shoes, he can speak any language, but if he also accepts orders and serves customers, he should know basic Lithuanian,” she claimed to BNS.
According to D. Asanavičiūtė, society’s attitude towards this issue should also change.
“We adapt very quickly to another language, to situations, we are extremely tolerant. But maybe our society should also teach the Lithuanian language to the people who have arrived, to concentrate and help those who have arrived here”, said the parliamentarian.
According to D. Asanavičiūtė, amendments to the law are proposed not because there are many violations or because the problem of miscommunication is big: “It is not noticed. But certain things have to be done preventively, not by putting out some fires or trying to respond after the event.”
The head of the Confederation of Lithuanian Employers, Danas Arlauskas, is convinced that the state should take care of Lithuanian language training for foreigners, and employers should strive to make their knowledge of the Lithuanian language as broad as possible.
“Providing the basics is a matter for the state, because it is also a matter of national security, and later the employer would take care of upgrading the employee’s qualifications,” said D. Arlauskas.
He believes that a part of foreigners should be allowed to acquire minimal knowledge of the language, and those working in medicine, trade, and the social sector should be able to pursue deeper knowledge.
D. Arlauskas says that it would be bad if the state raised the language bar too high for foreigners and did not allow the employer to decide on the level of her payment.
However, D. Arlauskas does not agree that the requirement to provide Lithuanian information about goods would complicate business and force them to increase prices. “In the beginning, there are initial investments, but they are small, and then they cost almost nothing,” he told BNS.
Amendments to the law propose obliging manufacturers, sellers, and service providers to provide consumers with the most important information about goods and services in the national language and to label goods with it.
An exception is proposed to be applied when the requirement to speak Lithuanian would be an unreasonable limitation of the right to work.
VVTAT: few complaints
According to the State Consumer Rights Protection Service (VVTAT), there are not many complaints from residents that information about a product or service was not provided in the national language.
“The fact that consumers rarely complain about the lack of instructions about a product or service in the national language does not mean that the business complies with the requirements to provide information in Lithuanian. Although VVTAT does not collect exact statistics, it can be said that such requests make up to 5 percent. of all user requests received by the service – a total of about 10.6 thousand were received last year. complaints”, said the head of the service, Goda Aleksaitė, to BNS
According to her, the law already provides that manufacturers, sellers or service providers must provide consumers with certain information and label goods in the national language.
“The responsibility to prove that the information has been provided to the user in accordance with the requirements falls on the entrepreneur”, asserted G. Aleksaitė.
Last year, VVTAT wrote 192 protocols for non-compliance with labeling requirements. About a fifth of them are related to not providing instructions in the official language.
