This is a special issue entirely focused on the topic of language in Ukraine. It starts with a long take of mine on this question that never ceased to fascinate me and is followed by a compilation of news stories, features and academic articles, in both English, Ukrainian and Russian, published during the war but also before. Enjoy, and please share this issue with people around you if you found it valuable.
When I first heard Russian-speaking Ukrainian friends and colleagues express shame and even disgust at the idea of speaking Russian, almost immediately after the beginning of the invasion, I wondered how widely-shared this sentiment was, and how far this would go. These friends tended after all to represent a fairly small segment of the Ukrainian population, and I wasn’t sure these pleas to stop speaking Russian would go beyond the urban, well-educated and activist part of society.
A year and a half later, it is pretty clear that the trend has gone beyond. The sound of Ukrainian is more common in the street, even in overwhelmingly Russian-speaking cities—you’ll get waiters and shop employees opening conversations in Ukrainian, even if they might switch back to Russian later. Since the beginning of the war, several bilingual news websites decided to stop operating their Russian-language sections. Polls show a sizeable part of the Russian-speaking Ukrainian population has switched, or tries to switch, to the Ukrainian language. 80% of job offers on the popular website Work.ua are now written in Ukrainian, compared to just 50% two years ago.
I met a teenager in the Mykolaiv region who refused to speak anything other than Ukrainian, standing next to her father who was recalling in Russian how Russian soldiers had entered their village and occupied their house; Taking a train to Zaporizhzhia, I struck up a conversation with a mother and her teenage daughter, who kept laughingly correcting her mom’s shaky Ukrainian. A well-known novelist I met in Kyiv announced her latest novel, which was supposed to leave the printing presses in Kharkiv just as the war started, would be her last one written in the Russian language. Anyone who’s been in Ukraine this past year and a half has dozens of examples like this.
But Russian is still routinely spoken by millions of Ukrainians, and there are lots of people who disagree with the framing of Russian as the “language of the enemy”. Cities like Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia or Odesa remain overwhelmingly Russian-speaking, and even Kyiv is still the bilingual city it has been this past decade (it was mostly Russian-speaking before that). Just yesterday, I listened to the Ukrainian (and Ukrainian-language) radio station NV as it discussed the situation in Georgia surrounding Mikheil Saakashvili, and which featured a long interview with an activist in Tbilisi done fully in Russian. And obviously, many, many Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline also speak Russian.
How to accommodate these two realities? First, I think it is useful to get a good understanding of the linguistic situation in Ukraine prior to the war. Here’s a great recap written by French researcher Anna Colin Lebedev, a specialist of both Russia and Ukraine, in her 2022 book “Never Brothers? Ukraine & Russia, a post soviet tragedy” (translation is mine).
Whereas the entire population understands both languages, to the point where we can say that Ukrainians are all passively bilingual, they will prefer to speak in one language or the other. Fluency in both Ukrainian and Russian by the majority of the population has these past decades been at the heart of the linguistic contract in Ukraine, where bilingual conversations are common in the day to day life, with a customer asking a question in one language and the employee answering in another, a TV host interviewing his guest in one language and getting the answer in the other language. [...] This linguistic contract requires at the very least the understanding of both languages, lest you seem insulting.
This I think isn’t just an excellent overview of the linguistic situation in Ukraine. It also provides the best framework to explain what has changed since the beginning of the Russian invasion: that linguistic contract, based on bilingualism, is currently being rewritten.
In most places in Ukraine, outright demanding that someone speak to you in Ukrainian used to be a breach of the country’s (implicit) linguistic contract. The default expectation when meeting someone you don’t know was bilingualism, and a complex dance to find out which language is the most appropriate (I linked below a piece published in the New Yorker that is the best testimony out there about this).
In many instances, you can already feel how the default expectation has shifted from bilingualism to, simply, Ukrainian language. This doesn’t mean Russian isn’t or won’t be spoken anymore—if you live in a mostly Russian-speaking place, if you know the person in front of you prefers to speak Russian and you do as well, you’ll talk Russian. But I think it’s possible that the very common bilingual conversations will start being frowned upon, with the expectation that everyone should default to Ukrainian in such cases. We’ll see—one year and a half is a really short time in terms of linguistic development, so things might unfold in a different way. But there’s no doubt the Russian invasion has triggered major changes.
Language during the war
New Yorker / April 2023 / A Question of Language in Ukraine
If you can only read one piece about the language issue in Ukraine, let it be this touching, wonderful comic by Zhenya Oliinyk, a Ukrainian illustrator based in Kyiv.
Zaxid (in Ukrainian) / July 2023 / The suffering of Ukrainian dubbing—Why subtitles will not solve the English problem
Ukrainian society has recently been embroiled in fierce debate after president Volodymyr Zelensky introduced to the parliament a bill to ban the Ukrainian dubbing of English-language movies in Ukrainian cinemas. But honestly, the main reason I wanted to highlight this op-ed published by Lviv-based outlet Zaxid was the opening anecdote. In it, journalist Lyubko Petrenko recalls an episode of his youth in the Soviet-era Lviv of the 70s, when he and his friends watched a local TV channel and stumbled upon a popular Soviet TV show, about a daring Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, fully dubbed in Ukrainian.
“And how did we, schoolchildren, feel about this? It’s probably hard to imagine now, but at the time we found it quite funny. Can you imagine? We, Ukrainian-speaking children from Lviv, patriots who secretly honored the UPA and even risked falling into KGB hands by painting tridents on fences. Our ears, trained on Russian-language cinema, were suddenly cut by the phrases of “Ukrainian-speaking” Germans. “Today I believe more than ever in the victory of the Reich!”; “The Fuhrer highly appreciated your devotion”... Laughter and laughter.” The same Germans speaking in Russian (as in the original version of the TV show) would have felt perfectly normal, but hearing it in Ukrainian felt jarring… and hilarious.
Decades later, Lyubko Petrenko writes, hearing foreign actors speaking in Ukrainian through dubbing has been completely normalized: “Recently, while taking my youngest daughter to the playground in Lviv, I noticed a few Russian-speaking children there. Obviously, these are the children of internally displaced people who, escaping from Russian aggression, came here from Lysychansk, Nikopol, Melitopol, etc. So, these children, like us once, like to pretend to be popular movie heroes. And here the situation is diametrically opposite to ours half a century ago. Ukrainian-language phrases by Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man and other superheroes are organically woven into the generally Russian-language game. And one day these children stood in a circle, held hands and said quoted Ralph [from the movie “Wreck-It Ralph”], in Ukrainian of course: “I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be– than me.” It moved me to tears.”
Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian & Russian) / April 2023 / Kharkiv’s mayor won a court case after using the Russian language on social networks
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov has been the only major Ukrainian politician openly defending his right to use the Russian language, with the argument that nobody can doubt the patriotic credentials of Russian-speaking Kharkiv after the horrors its inhabitants went through. It’s pretty clear that Terekhov is attempting to position himself for the post-war political battles, betting on an electoral segment made of the Russian-speaking, patriotic population opposed to the framing of the Russian language as simply the “language of the enemy”.
Al Jazeera / April 2023 / Ukrainians who grew up speaking Russian learn a new mother tongue
Zaxid (in Ukrainian) / July 2022 / Desperate Ukrainian speakers—How locals help people learn Ukrainian, and why it’s important
Many small, enlightening details in this story about a Ukrainian language club in Lviv. These clubs have flourished in Ukraine this past year as millions of IDPs, mostly from Russian-speaking regions, settled in towns and cities where Ukrainian language is a lot more common. This particular piece really encapsulates the sincere desire to help newly-arrived Ukrainians, but also the cultural misunderstandings and even tensions that can come with it. Many of these clubs struggle to find attendants, according to the piece, and Tatyana Kolesnyk, one of the two founders of the “Club of desperate Ukrainian speakers”, wonders: “why do some Ukrainians continue to communicate in Russian?” The club’s second founder, Valentina Kryzhanovska, agrees and recalls a scene she still finds “incomprehensible”: “I was standing in line for coffee, there were young women with children in front of me. They spoke Russian amongst themselves, but one of them spoke to the barista in perfectly correct Ukrainian - with firm sounds, without surzhyk insertions. They had a whole conversation, which I listened to in amazement. And then the woman returned to her friend and switched to Russian again. I don't understand why people do that.”
The Village Ukraine (in Ukrainian) / December 2022 / “Every day is a struggle, it’s human destiny”: how Amil and Ramil from "Kurgan & Agregat" became volunteers
This very long piece about the Kharkiv-based hip-hop band “Kurgan & Agregat” and their volunteering work during the war isn’t really about language. But it features a captivating and detailed aside about surzhyk, the popular dialect that mixes features of Ukrainian and Russian languages, and which is at the heart of Kurgan & Agregat’s art. Here’s a Google-translated extract:
In "Luxembourg, Luxembourg" [a 2022 comedy starring two members of the band] Amil and Ramil speak in surzhyk, as they do in real life: partly because of this, the film was set in the town of Lubny in the Poltava region, not so far from the twins' native southern Kharkiv region. Antonio Lukich says that the main characters' use of surzhyk, rather than the literary Ukrainian language, was fundamentally important. “In Ukraine, surzhyk was used [in media] only in a comedic context, but we try to talk about serious things in surzhyk” he says […] Ramil Nasirov admits that he was worried about how the use of surzhyk would be perceived in Ukraine after the start of the full-scale war with Russia. But, to him, the main thing is to be organic: “Antonio told us: "speak naturally, so that you can be believed. You speak surzhyk, in the movie you also speak surzhyk. That's all” […] “Whether you like it or not, surzhyk is the language of realism” writes Zezyulin [Dmytro Zezyulin, singer for the band “Latexfauna”].
“If you are creating a cultural product rooted in realism, then a lyrical hero or just a character from central Ukraine or Slobozhanshchyna will be more expressive and more convincing if he speaks in surzhyk. Moreover, surzhyk conveys speech semitones, while in literary language it will be necessary to use more words for descriptions in order to bring the recipient closer to the correct understanding of what the author wants to say. [...] Yes, surzhyk is partly a product of Russification, although many linguists insist that it is a dialect. Yes, time will pass, and it may be weathered down. But we have to live today, and consume the cultural products of today. But not the products of the fucking Russians.” Ramil summarizes it in his own way: “I’ve read on Twitter that surzhyk is a fucked-up Russian language. That's why we should speak it, to fuck this language up”.
Language before the war
Kyiv Post / April 2019 / Brian Milakovsky: How Ukraine’s new language law will affect Donbas
You don’t really need to pay attention to the headline about the language law, which dominated discussions at the time—this piece remains very much worth a read four years later for its explanation of the Donbas’ rich linguistic history, followed by harsh Russification: “And so began long decades of Soviet Russification, which wore away at the remains of Ukrainian identity in the region. In the 1960s and 70s there were periodic thaws in Soviet language policy that led to the opening of new Ukrainian schools and cultural groups, only to later face another crackdown. The Soviet dissident Oleksa Tykhyi from Donetsk Oblast described how the Soviet system reserved only a token place for Ukrainian, requiring Russian as the means to all forms of academic and professional advancement. For voicing this belief, Tykhyi would be sent to a prison camp in the Urals, where he died.”
Hromadske (in Ukrainian & Russian) / July 2019 / “Politicians who pick the slogan “Army, Language, Faith” do not understand the majority of citizens”
This 2019 interview of Ukrainian political researcher Olga Onuch (@oonuch) was also kicked off by debate around the language law, as well as Petro Poroshenko’s infamous campaign slogan, but it is more generally an important discussion on how identity and language are tied in Ukraine.
If we used to think that the language handed down by mothers, grandmothers and parents would impact how a person thinks about NATO or the EU, we have since learned that this is not the case. Same goes with the language used at home. It can happen that the partner speaks another language and brings it into the family. We also thought that ethnic Ukrainians think differently about politics than ethnic Russians in Ukraine, that there is a West-East divide, considering that more ethnic Russians live in the East and South of Ukraine. But this is also not true. A much better indicator of political beliefs - about the EU, NATO or whether you will go to the Maidan - is the language a person uses to communicate at work.
Centre for East European and International Studies / May 2018 / Linking language and security in Ukraine
This short piece argued back in 2018 that “bilingualism does not undermine the notion of a Ukrainian identity”, with this somewhat bitter conclusion: “current political climate in Ukraine does not allow much space for a discussion about bilingualism as a desirable and stabilizing feature in a state characterized by diversity”. It was true back then and it’s even more true now.
But I think it’s worth pointing out that while bilingualism has long been an inescapable aspect of life in Ukraine, it never was elevated as a clear, positive part of Ukrainian identity, never taken as something to be proud of. Put more simply: while there always were in Ukraine’s post-soviet history political forces advocating for more Ukrainian language or for more Russian language, there wasn’t anyone interested in promoting bilingualism, considered at worst a colonial remnant to be phased out, and at best something neither good nor bad, just… there. It is therefore not surprising that this discussion never took off after 2014. Bilingualism openly acknowledged by Ukrainian society and the state as a “desirable and stabilizing feature” is likely to remain a road not taken.
Academic articles
arXiv / June 2023 / The Politics of Language Choice: How the Russian-Ukrainian War Influences Ukrainians' Language Use on Twitter (“Notably, we show that out of those users predominately tweeting in Russian before the war, roughly half of them tweet more in Ukrainian after. Strikingly, around a quarter of them switch to predominately tweeting in Ukrainian, i.e. performs a hard-switch. It is worth noting, that we do not observe more than a handful of switches in the other direction.”)
Canadian Slavonic Papers / May 2023 / Russophone literature of Ukraine: self-decolonization, deterritorialization, reclamation
Translation Review / October 2022 / A Conversation with Ukrainian Translators Kate Tsurkan and Daisy Gibbons on Translating and Creating Amid the Russian Invasion
International Journal of Multilingualism / January 2021 / Defending borders and crossing boundaries: ideologies of polylanguaging in interviews with bilingual Ukrainian youth
Journal of Language, Identity & Education / May 2016 / Our Language: (Re)Imagining Communities in Ukrainian Language Classrooms
As a Ukrainian immigrant to US from a primarily Russian-speaking family (only my father and eldest sister are fluent in Ukrainian), this is something I have been struggling with since the start of the war, and it's both grim and reassuring to see that others are also struggling with it. Thank you for this discussion and compilation
Fascinating article!