Language Inspectorate
Language Inspectorate () is a governmental body under the Ministry of Education of Estonia. The inspectorate was founded in 1990 as the State Language Board with the mandate to, as the Commissioner for Human Rights states, to facilitate the republic's expectation that people offering services to the public should speak Estonian. Since 1995, its director is Ilmar Tomusk. It carries out state supervision with the primary task to ensure that the Language Act and other legal acts regulating language use are observed. Non-observance of the Language Act may result in warnings, written orders or fines. During the Soviet occupation, an intensive program of Russification had been undertaken. A massive program of Russian language education was imposed at the expense of the Estonian language and Russian replaced Estonian as the sole language in certain areas of the economy such as banking, mining, energy production, statistics, railways, naval and air transport. Estonians had to learn Russian in order to keep their jobs. By the 1980s, Russian was established as the official language while the Estonian language was effectively reduced to that of a de facto minority language within the country. Due to the increasing restrictions upon the public use of the Estonian