March to Monolingualism? The Politics of Language in Ukraine

Angus Clark

On the 16th of January, all areas of public facing business, from shops to restaurants, online businesses to street vendors, were obliged to start using the state language in Ukraine. That language is, unsurprisingly, Ukrainian. This change is one of the final effects of a raft of legislation made in the closing days of Petro Poroshenko’s presidency in 2019, just before the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, took office. The other most significant effect was the closing down of the remaining Russian-language schools in the country last year in September. But there is a great difference between these two measures, one of which is as essential as the other is ridiculous. The new change in public service is a step too far in the process of Ukrainianization, which began in earnest after the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, and as a process is really much more about Derussification than anything else.

The Ukrainians have so many other things to be annoyed about that the “language question” generally fades into the background. Gas prices, an economy that doesn’t work, massive corruption by seemingly every political actor regardless of their party affiliation, and, of course, the loss of Crimea and the temporarily occupied territories in Donbass and Luhansk in the East. Next to these problems, language does not matter. But it has long been a tool used by Ukrainian nationalists to shore up their own support, just as much as it has been a tool by mysterious agents who most-definitely-aren’t Russian to divide the Ukrainian people in the other direction. But understanding the language question requires knowledge about Ukraine that stretches beyond 2014. At least, it does if you are trying to solve the problem.

In Crimea, now de facto part of the Russian Federation, the only remaining signs of its recent Ukrainian past are the emergency exit signs people have forgotten to change over, and bits and pieces like these signs in a supermarket. Crimea, and Luhansk and Donetsk (which last year outlawed Ukrainian altogether), are examples of how to mess up the language question in the opposite direction, by pursuing total russification. (Image: Angus Clark)

Shortly before it finally collapsed, the Soviet Union raised Russian to the status of “language of inter-ethnic communication”. It was the language that bound together a people – the Soviet people – reaching from Chisinau in Moldova to Anadyr in Chukotka. After the Soviet Union collapsed, this special status for Russian remained. It’s on the books in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan still. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan gives Russia a status almost equal to the state language, while Kyrgyzstan and Belarus give Russian both actually consider Russian co-equal state language with their other state languages.

But looking at things officially is a problem. In spite of its limited official status, there are plenty of ethnic Uzbeks in Tashkent and elsewhere who do not know a word of Uzbek because their entire education and world is still Russian. And in Ukraine the situation is even more complicated. What they call their mother tongue is not necessarily the language the Ukrainian people use day-to-day, which is why looking at surveys about the knowledge of Russian in Ukraine can be deceiving. The “mother tongue” of the Ukrainian people is undeniably Ukrainian, because it is the language they associate with their ethnic identity as Ukrainians, but the language that a large minority of them speak at home or work is not Ukrainian, but rather Russian. 

Traditionally, the divide is between South and Eastern Ukraine (Russian-speaking) and the West and Central parts (Ukrainian-speaking) of Ukraine, with Kiev/Kyiv as a bilingual melting pot because of immigration. Thanks to 2014, the Russian-speaking parts are rather on the back foot in terms of national heft. Still, in a survey held across non-occupied Ukraine in 2017, Ukrainians under 30 (another persistent idea is that only Soviet hangovers speak Russian) stated that they still used Russian in large numbers. Specifically, 30% used Russian exclusively at home, 18% used a mix of Ukrainian and Russian, and the rest used Ukrainian. Outside of the family, bilingualism becomes even more popular.

Russian is hard to avoid in Ukraine, and not just because so many people speak it. The most famous Ukrainian journalist, Dmitri Gordon, uses Russian on his popular TV-show. If you want to be a successful Twitch streamer or musician, you make your content in Russian because it lets you reach a larger audience. Ukrainian TV shows are often filmed in Russian because a) Ukrainians almost all understand it and b) the shows can then be marketed in other Russian-speaking countries. President Zelensky’s own Sluga Naroda, a show about a man who becomes president, was filmed in Russian. Speaking of Zelensky, he didn’t actually know how to speak Ukrainian until about five years ago. He simply never needed it.

Statue of Taras Shevchenko in L’viv, Ukraine (Image: James Wilson)

There is a long history of Ukrainian being repressed and stamped out by Russian speakers. Those days, thankfully, are no more. Ukrainian is seeing a renaissance. In the West, we are hearing about “real” Ukrainian literature, about Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka. But literature written in Ukrainian isn’t the limit to Ukrainian culture, and it shouldn’t be confused with it. The most famous Ukrainian writer remains Nikolai Gogol, and the Minister for Culture in Ukraine recently made the (admittedly outrageous) claim on an interview that Chekhov should be seen as a Ukrainian writer, as back during Chekhov’s day his birthplace, Taganrog, was Taganrikh to its inhabitants. (This was before the Holodomor genocide decimated the Ukrainian people, who once stretched right to the Caspian sea, and left them confined to their current borders.)

As ridiculous as it sounds and is, the Minister for Culture is on the right track. Ukraine’s history is bound up with Russia’s, and though they are diverging now their common roots aren’t worth eradicating. Take the great poet, Shevchenko, who arguably founded the Ukrainian poetic language. He wrote a great deal in Russian too – his Russian-language short stories never found favour in Russia, which may be the only reason why he’s not held up alongside Gogol as a transnational, transcultural figure. But is Gogol really Ukrainian anyway? His Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka is filled with Ukrainian words, Ukrainian realia. All the same, he didn’t write in Ukrainian, so I suppose we had better ignore him. Much the same may be said of one of the most famous living Ukrainian writers, Andrey Kurkov, who like Gogol made the terrible mistake of writing in Russian and using snatches of Ukrainian in speech, and thereby made himself unpublishable in both countries. (His work is translated into Ukrainian before publication in his own country, and banned in Russia).

What about Kiev, or Kyiv as we now know it? Or Odessa, which now should be spelled Odesa? Should Ukrainians throw out Babel’s Odessa Tales, Bulgakov’s The White Guard? The very air that infuses the cultural heartlands of Ukraine is bilingual, and turning one’s back on it over short-term geopolitical considerations is a great shame.

A night at the Hotel Odessa or Hotel Odesa? (Image: James Wilson)

And so that brings us to these laws. To have lived in Ukraine for 30 independent years and not know Ukrainian is really rather embarrassing. But it also reflects the reality of life on the ground, where Donetsk or Kharkov or even much of Kiev (to you, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, the name is spelt this way still) are perfectly navigable without the mova [Ukrainian - language]. The people of Ukraine should know Ukrainian, and measures have been taken to ensure this is the case. But really, there is only one necessary measure – education. If you can ensure that every child in Ukraine learns Ukrainian properly at school, by being immersed in it during lessons, then within a generation any language problems will have sorted themselves out. The people of Kharkov will still speak Russian to each other, but when their friend Boris comes visiting from Lviv they will easily switch over to Ukrainian for him. As for their parents, who cares? They are behind the times. They always have been.

Trying to tell people which language to speak while doing business is ridiculous on a lot of levels. For one thing, it’s rather intrusive on the part of the state. For another, it is not the case that people couldn’t speak Ukrainian earlier, especially if asked. One of the most brilliant things about Ukraine is that people really will have conversations with each other in two languages, with each person using the language that he or she is most comfortable in. Go onto any of the Ukrainian television channels available on YouTube and listen to a talk show – there’ll be one or two Russian speakers every time. And that’s the way things should be, because that is the way things really are.

The official language of Ukraine should remain Ukrainian. In spite of the hissing and screeching of the Russian press, support for raising Russian to the status of a second official language has never really broken through 15%. But Ukrainian is not the only language in Ukraine. Back before the scheme was banned by their own raving nationalists, Ukraine allowed its regions the right to choose regional languages. Unsurprisingly, Russian was chosen by a great many. Only a model of compromise, where Russian retains a role on a regional and cultural level while being subservient to Ukrainian in matters of state, will allow linguistic divisions in Ukraine to be resolved. Perhaps Taras Kremen, who is in charge of protecting Ukrainian (from whom or what?), would disagree with me. But how on earth is Ukraine ever to get either Crimea or Donetsk or Luhansk back when everything the country is doing right now indicates it won’t compromise on anything to do with language?

Let’s be real here. Russia is to blame for plenty of the problems Ukraine is going through. And for that reason alone, Ukraine would be perfectly justified in pretending that Russian never had anything to do with their country. But as an MMLL student, and indeed someone who would like to learn Ukrainian myself one day, I like languages and I know how important they are. A forced march towards monolingualism is hardly going to improve Ukraine’s prospects. It will hardly heal deep social divisions, remove corruption, or make anybody richer. If anything, it will do the opposite. And so I sincerely hope that one day Ukraine will turn around and say it went too far with this particular law, and let the little babushkas selling mittens outside the metro speak whatever language they damn well please.