It’s been 16 months since the first Ukrainian
soldier was shot by Russian troops in soon-to-be occupied Crimea. Since then, Russia’s
ongoing war against Ukraine has presented the country’s Russian-speaking
population with some tricky questions about identity.
“I’m afraid of speaking Russian now, because Putin
might want to protect me” — that became the frequently repeated joke last
year after the Russian president made it clear he considered Russian-speakers
in Ukraine to be endangered by Kiev’s new government.
Now many Russian speakers in Ukraine — who live
primarily in the country’s east and in large cities — are demonstratively
turning to Ukrainian as a badge of self-identification. A concise tutorial on
how to switch from Russian to Ukrainian, written by a Kiev blogger, has earned thousands of shares and
reposts.
Patriotic Russian-speakers in Kiev and big eastern cities
are pledging on social networks to speak Ukrainian to their children, hoping to
make the next generation more fluent and natural speakers of their native
tongue.
For the first time in decades, speaking Ukrainian is
seen as fashionable rather than backward.
Ukraine’s strong civil society has also been an
important factor in “socializing” the country’s adult population into using
Ukrainian. Amid the dire lack of state-funded support for life-long education,
dozens of organizations and initiatives teach the language to adults across the
country. Activists say the bulk of their students came in the wake of the
Euromaidan revolution and the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Most of
the students, says an organizer of the biggest course in Kiev, are
30-to-50-somethings. Free Ukrainian courses have mushroomed in big, mostly
Russian-speaking cities such as Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv,
Kramatorsk and Odessa. However, they’ve also popped up in Lviv and Vinnytsia,
Ukrainian-speaking cities where many people displaced from Crimea and the east
have settled.
The media landscape is also unmistakably becoming more
Ukrainian. Granted, the traditional media are still somewhat dominated by
Russian: two of the top three TV channels broadcast their evening news and most
entertainment programs in Russian. Most high-circulation weekly magazines are
published in Russian. However, the emergence of powerful Internet-based news
outlets is bucking the trend. Ukrainian-language web-based TV, most notably Hromadske.TV and Espreso, have few Russian-language competitors of comparable
quality, although the former has started to produce programs in Russian.
Since over half of Ukrainians regularly use the Internet, the social media is turning
into another channel of “Ukrainization,” especially of the middle class. Top
bloggers writing in Ukrainian on Facebook and Twitter are boosting their
follower bases, and many Ukrainian Internet users are starting to abandon
platforms based in Russia, such as VK, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. A controversy
over Facebook blocking Ukrainian-created
content, allegedly by Russian citizens staffing tech support teams in Dublin, provoked
calls to write more in Ukrainian as a way to insulate the “Ukrainian”
blogosphere from Russian interference. Discussing politics in Ukrainian makes
it harder for Russian trolls to chip in.
The gravitational pull of the Ukrainian language is
making a mark on business, too.
For the first time, Ukrainian pop music is selling
better than Russian. A popular chain of coffee shops, Lviv Handmade
Chocolate, has made waitresses and baristas that serve customers only in
Ukrainian into a signature policy, yet the chain is popular across the whole
country. Roman Matys, a Ukrainian activist, campaigns for companies to include
labels and documentation in Ukrainian in addition to Russian, and several large
companies have yielded to his group’s
petitions.
For the past twenty years, state education policy has
been to promote Ukrainian in schools without directly impending the use of
Russian. Ukraine’s post-Soviet governments, even pro-Russian ones, treated
secondary education in Ukrainian as a generous concession to national-minded
activists. While only 47 percent of Ukrainian schools taught in Ukrainian at
the end of Soviet rule in the 1980s, that rate steadily increased to 75 percent
in 2004 and 86 percent in 2013. And as Ukrainian has become the principal teaching
language at leading universities, schoolkids and their parents perceive it as
more of a priority, even if they use Russian at home.
The trend was not reversed even after the passage of the 2012 “language law,”which provided for greater use
of Russian on the regional level. Legislative initiatives pertaining to the
language use have been politicized since the Maidan revolution as well.
Parliament’s attempt to repeal the controversial language law in February 2014
(which was rejected by a presidential veto) was used as a rallying call by
pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine is still a bilingual country. But the
Ukrainization phenomenon is not just anecdotal — survey data shows that, in the
last decade, the country’s linguistic landscape has undergone a visible change.
In 2005, 42 percent of Ukrainians claimed that they spoke mostly
Ukrainian at home. By 2011, 53 percent said they spoke it in their
everyday lives. Since most of them are perfectly fluent in Russian as well, the
11 percent upsurge, representing at least 5 million people, reflects the share
of Ukrainian society that has switched from Russian to Ukrainian. The
Euromaidan revolution and conflict with Russia accelerated that trend: a poll
conducted in May 2015 shows that almost 60 percent of the population prefer to use Ukrainian
in everyday communication.
This burgeoning popularity of Ukrainian, especially
among the youth and the middle class, is having unifying effects on the
country’s social structures. It facilitates social mobility between the
east and the west. Many western Ukrainian students are bringing their Ukrainian
to universities in Kiev and the big eastern cities. Young IT and service
professionals who move from Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk to Lviv tend
to bring Ukrainian into their everyday lives, despite Lviv’s
tolerance for Russian speakers.
The revival of Ukrainian is only one of many societal
upshots in the Ukrainian-Russian war. Yet, as Ukrainian-savvy children come of
age and the middle class starts to pay more for Ukrainian products and
services, it may well become one of the most durable ones. Along with the
blue-and-yellow flag and the embroidered traditional shirts so often seen in
the streets in this trying time for Ukraine, the Ukrainian language is set to
become a cherished, and practiced, national symbol.
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