“The events of February 2022 changed the life of every Ukrainian in Ukraine and beyond… [and] Language is very much part of the current war” – this is the opening line from Dr. Olga Maxwells’ podcast, Dnipro-born and Melbourne-based applied linguist at the School of Languages and Linguistics, the University of Melbourne. Together with two Ukrainian researchers, a historian and a sociolinguist, and two young Ukrainians displaced by the war, Olga explores the complexities of the language question in Ukraine.
In this outline of an hour-long conversation, we will summarize how language could be used as part of ideological manipulation, we will discuss the recent historical background of the language politics Ukraine, explain the phenomenon of diglossia, touch on the role of surzhyk in everyday communication, and share the likely conditions for sustainable language shift.
Importantly, this outline does not intend to promote any particular views on language or language choice. Instead, it offers food for thought and provides historical and scientific context to the ongoing debates about the politics of language in Ukraine. Such knowledge might be useful for the promotion of inclusion within diverse Ukrainian communities and serve as a kind reminder of the complexities within its society to the curious outsiders.
Intro
Dr Olga Maxwell: Ukraine is a nation of many languages. Depending on where you are in Ukraine, you can hear Hungarian, Crimean Tartar, Romanian, or Polish, but it’s the Ukrainian and Russian languages that are at the heart of Russia’s war against Ukraine. These two have coexisted for centuries on the territory of present-day Ukraine…
On passive bilingualism and ideological manipulation
Dr Olga Maxwell: One of the key pretexts for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine both in 2014 and 2022 was the so-called need to protect ‘ruskoyazychnoye naseleniye’ or the Russian speaking population in Ukraine. According to historian, Serhii Plokhy, the ideologists of the Russo-Ukrainian war go back to the 19th century. They emphasize Russia’s imperial intentions and its denial of the Ukrainian nation. The irony is that Russia’s aggression is most felt in those areas with large majorities of people who speak Russian as their home language. The cities like Mariupol, in ruins, the mass graves, the multitudes of victims from events like the flooding of the Khakhovka dam. Many, many of those dead and displaced lived and loved in the Russian language.
Dr Natalia Kudriavtseva: I would say that there are external as well as internal misconceptions about the language situation in Ukraine. First of all, Ukrainian speakers versus Russian speakers. That is the view of Ukrainian speakers as sort of opposed to Russian speakers and vice versa… And all of the misconceptions that follow, such as … Ukrainian speakers being more west oriented and Russian speakers being pro Russian. This is all nonsense … invented by Russian propaganda to claim authority over those people in Ukraine who speak Russian as their first language…
[T]he so-called Russian speakers of the Donbas, are in fact passive bilinguals. This means that while they speak Russian, they also easily understand Ukrainian. This explains the phenomenon of non-accommodating or receptive bilingualism in Ukraine, where one can see two people communicating, one in Ukrainian and the other one in Russian and understanding each other pretty well. … [P]ositing the speakers as Russian monolinguals would be an ideological manipulation…Dr Olga Maxwell: …I should add that the Russian language spoken in Ukraine doesn’t sound the same as Russian spoken in Russia. Like many languages, Ukrainian has quite a few dialects, and differences can be heard particularly in the southeastern, southwestern, and northern parts of Ukraine. There are even dialects in the Carpathian mountains, on the border with Romania, which a typical person in Kyiv would have a very hard time understanding.
Diglossia and a brief history of language regulations
Dr Olga Maxwell: What is known as the language question in Ukraine goes back centuries. It’s deeply rooted in the history of old empires and Ukraine’s position as the borderland between the west and the east. Ukraine has been subjected to centuries of enforced Russification. This has meant the systematic persecution of Ukrainian culture and language. In the Russian empire, Ukrainian was referred to as ‘Malorusskiy’, meaning ‘Little Russian’. It was viewed as something less, not a language in its own right. In the second half of the 19th century, Russia imposed several language policies on what is now Ukraine. The main aim was to stem the growth of the Ukrainian language, and more importantly, to suppress Ukrainian identity and the idea of Ukraine as a nation.
Dr Iryna Skubii: … [O]ne of the most important and catastrophic events for Ukrainian culture was the introduction of Valuev Circular of 1863, prohibiting publishing any educational, academic, or religious literature. Only fiction literature or prose would be allowed… And then, in 1876, The Ems Decree was introduced, which banned all Ukrainian publications and even prohibited to bring them from abroad… Formally, this decree was in action until the beginning of the 20th century… when restrictions were lifted thanks to the demands of workers and, intelligentsia… At the time, many of Ukrainian writers would immigrate abroad or move to Ukrainian lands that belonged to Austro-Hungarian empire, Galicia, for instance, to Lviv, and there they would find new connections with scholars and writers in this part of Ukrainian lands, and translate their works into other European languages and publish them abroad… [During the 1920s] socialist government in Ukraine and in Moscow introduced the politics named ‘korenization’, which would allow developing of different cultures of national republics… Consequently, the Ukrainian-speaking population in the cities grew in number and so did Ukrainian-language publications.
Dr Olga Maxwell: … [this period] was short lived. And what followed was a much longer period of persecution of everything Ukrainian. In what’s known as the ‘Executed Renaissance’, Ukraine’s educated elites [including writers] were arrested in large numbers, sent to the Gulag, and many killed…
Dr Iryna Skubii: We will see lots of connections between repressions against Ukrainian writers and language [in 1920-30’s] and the Holodomor [1932-33 mass famine], these events took place at the same time… People were trying to escape the starving regions. When they were trying to find anything edible or try to migrate to bigger cities, they would go to the eastern part of Ukraine to these Russified cities, to Donetsk and Luhansk regions in particular. So, in this situation, their survival became their main priority, and, language issue was merged with the idea about their survival. Because of this, we see the growing number of population of these industrial cities while Ukrainian rural areas became kind of deserts for some time because around 4,000,000 people were killed by this famine. The estimations, this Soviet famine of 1932-33 had the most devastating impact on the population of Ukraine.
Dr Olga Maxwell: … [Years later] During the Soviet era, Russian and Ukrainians served different social functions within a community, a phenomenon we linguists refer to as diglossia. Russian was the high language. It was prestigious and linked with power and social status. It was the language of the elite, the educated, the media, the government. It opened doors to education and better job opportunities. Ukrainian was the low language, a provincial village language with little prestige. The Soviet era also saw the emergence of a stereotype in popular culture. People who spoke Ukrainian were viewed as uncultured oafs…
Ukrainian was made a state language in 1989 when the Soviet Ukrainian Republic adopted the law of languages. In a way, the recognition of Ukrainian as an official and legitimate language amounted to the rejection of the long history of colonial language ideologies imposed by Imperial Russia and later the Soviet Union. At the very onset of Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Russian still dominated in large urban centers and the media space.
Surzhyk and the language choice
Dr Olga Maxwell: There is another ‘language’ already mentioned by our guests. It’s called surzhyk, and it’s the first language for many people all over Ukraine. It exists largely in spoken form. Surzhyk is intertwined with the history of Ukraine. Centuries of Russification and language ideologies promoting standard or pure language. It has long been stigmatized and its speakers viewed as poorly educated and lacking sophistication. Surzhyk is a mixed ‘language’ and comes in many shapes and forms, cutting across generations and social classes of that linguistic middle ground between Ukrainian and Russian. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish what is a local dialect and what is surzhyk…
Dr Natalia Kudriavtseva: …In Ukraine since independence, the dominant ideology has been the perception of Ukrainian as a marker of identity, and this is quite natural… [However, the language situation is a bit more complex.] While Russian has been valued as a communication tool, the importance of Ukrainian is both communicative and symbolic. As Laada Bilaniuk writes, it has been well accepted that many people’s deeds show that being Russophone often goes along with being a Ukrainian patriot. New forms of national identification emerged after the Euromaidan [2013-2014], and the emerging identity is hybrid, and it is chosen, which means that people reject Russia without also rejecting the Russian language. While they may also learn and speak Ukrainian to choose their belonging to Ukraine. The war has been significantly politicizing language choice, and the beginning of Russian aggression in 2014 gave rise to the idea that speaking Russian can undermine Ukraine’s peace and security, while speaking Ukrainian is a sign of belonging to Ukraine. But there has always also been a counter view, a counter ideology, which sees this choice as transparent and politically neutral… The advancement of this ideology signals two important things, that speaking Ukrainian is not any longer perceived as a mock practice, and that Ukrainian is not any longer believed to be endangered as it was in the early post-Soviet years… [which is important as] language should be perceived as unmarked choice in order to be spoken by all…
The views of the authors do not necessarily reflect the position of the members of the organisation.