For centuries the Ukrainian language was relegated to the status of a “peasant language” by the foreign rulers of the lands that make up the country today and by foreign scholars in Europe and abroad who perpetuated this Russian imperial falsehood. More recently, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited a Soviet political elite who spoke Russian, and to this day all of Ukraine’s oligarchs are Russian-speaking. This has buttressed the post-colonial dominance of the Russian language and culture in the public sphere and the subsequent ostracism of the Ukrainian language. The Ukrainian-speaking majority has been historically marginalized as peripheral, with inferior access to high culture, quality education, prestigious jobs, political office, and the creation of wealth primarily due to the bias of the established colonial practices that saw Ukrainian as “low” and “rural.”
OP-ED
Andrej Lushnycky: Ukraine’s new language law rights historic wrongs
Young people wearing Ukrainian flags play drums at a rally in support of the Ukrainian language law in front of the Ukrainian parliament on April 25, 2019.
