Kowalski or Kovalskis

The large Polish minority living in Lithuania has demanded the right to spell its names according to Polish spelling, Jacek Pawlicki writes in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. A year ago the Lithuanian government passed a bill allowing the use of Polish spelling for names. "The Poles in Lithuania have difficulties with the spelling of their names because Lithuanians automatically change foreign-sounding names according to the rules of their own language - so instead of Emilia Plater you have Emilija Platerite, and the proverbial Kowalski becomes Kovalskis, or at best Kovalski. This happens because in recent years the Lithuanian authorities stopped using the Lithuanian endings and instead just change the letters that do not exist in the Lithuanian alphabet, like the letter 'w'. ... Linguistic purists argue that in Lithuania names should be written according to Lithuanian spelling because language law takes precedence over minority laws."

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