Editor’s Note: This story is from the special 30th Independence Day edition of Kyiv Post. Find it online or pick up a copy in Kyiv.
The EuroMaidan Revolution that drove out President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 ushered in a new era for Ukraine.
The country began to embrace a new European identity, a Euro-Atlantic vision, and above all, the cultural revival of its ancestral language, Ukrainian.
While it may now seem obvious that Ukrainian should be the national language of Ukraine, the language has endured centuries of repression.
The Soviet Union heavily discouraged its use in public settings and imperial Russia in the late 19th century outright banned its use in literature.
Now, 30 years since Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian language is getting more use at home and in the workplace. Ukrainian literature now receives international recognition. Use of the language has renewed an appreciation for Ukrainian culture and history.
According to a 2017 Razumkov Center poll, more than two thirds (68%) of Ukrainians now consider Ukrainian to be their native language, compared with just 50% of those interviewed by Rating Group in 2012. Other polls have shown that around half of Ukrainians actually speak Ukrainian at home.
This linguistic awakening has reshaped Ukraine and given new meaning to Ukrainian identity. It distanced Ukraine from its history of Russian influence and framed Ukrainian history within a larger European heritage.
Language laws & lives
Inna Sovsun, a lawmaker with the 20-member Voice faction in the Ukrainian parliament, is a passionate advocate for the Ukrainian language. Having grown up as a Ukrainian speaker in the heavily Russophone Kharkiv, Sovsun experienced first-hand discrimination towards her native language.
“Nobody directly told me we had to speak Russian, but it was just a matter of fact, that was the way it is,” Sovsun remembered. “I would get bullied at kindergarten because I spoke Ukrainian.”
Once labeled khokhlushka, a pejorative term for Ukrainian women, by Russian-speaking children, she later came to Kyiv and found comfort in the increasing use of the Ukrainian language in everyday life.
Despite statistical evidence to suggest that Ukrainian is on the rise, Sovsun agreed that while many people professed to be primary Ukrainian speakers, there remains a great deal of pressure to use Russian in a social context.
“People still see Russian as the language of power…the language of richer people. And that’s why people want to pretend that they belong in that stratus, and so people are secretly very ashamed of speaking Ukrainian on the streets,” Sovsun said.
Having shaped educational policy in Ukraine between 2014 and 2016, Sovsun had a clear vision on how Ukraine’s law on education and 2017 language laws have had a positive impact on Ukraine.
“Based on my own experience, when I used to go on the street in Kharkiv and speak Ukrainian, I would see aggression… but now when I go to a café and there are some waiters and they hear me speak in Ukrainian, they can now respond, and they are very happy to use it… they see it as a kind of bonding,” Sovsun said. “People now speak Ukrainian because they now know how to speak the language, they have the capacity.”
According to a 2017 Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research report, a majority of Ukrainians now support Ukrainian being the state language. Respondents from cities where many people speak Russian, such as Kharkiv, are also showing signs of softening their attitudes to the Ukrainian language. Most of them don’t feel like they’re part of any language war and are eager to learn Ukrainian as long as minority languages are also preserved.
Even though the language’s prestige is rising, Sovsun has had concerns about how Ukrainian had been taught in schools. She lamented that students studied decidedly “Soviet” literature and complex grammar rules, making learning Ukrainian a chore rather than fostering a love for the language.
Literary development
From Ukraine’s oral tradition of dumy to literary prose, the Ukrainian literature has a long history.
The first recorded written Ukrainian text, written in 1798, is Kotliarevsky’s Eneida; a burlesque heroic-epic poem.
Now, more than 200 years later, Ukrainian literature has been revived, with authors such as Serhiy Zhadan, Yuriy Andrukhovych, and Taras Prohasko receiving international recognition for their Ukrainian-language works.
The impact of Ukrainian literature need not be limited to the academic and literary fields, according to literary scholar and author Tetyana Ogarkova. The post-independence revival has had a profound impact of the social and cultural development of Ukraine, and all its citizens.
“Modern Ukrainian literature (that of after 1991) is one of the major factors for today’s Ukrainian identity… The ‘Founder of the Nation’ is neither Prince nor Tsar, nor philosopher, but rather a poet, Taras Shevchenko,” Ogarkova wrote.
Taras is such a symbol that multiple universities, parks, metro stations and districts are named in his honor. Monuments to the legendary Ukrainian writer can be found across former Soviet states and even in North America.
The Ukrainian literature, undoubtedly a cornerstone of Ukrainian culture and language, has helped forge Ukraine’s identity on the contemporary world stage.
Ukrainian civil society has recognised the soft power potential of renewed literary development. The Drahoman Prize, which awards Ukrainian translators for exporting Ukrainian literature to international audiences, founded in 2020 by the Ukrainian Institute, PEN Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Book Institute, has helped promote Ukraine on the world stage.
“Our independence since 1991 has spurred a greater momentum in Ukrainian literature…These leading authors have created a distinct anti-imperial identity, which is profoundly Ukrainian, but at the same time, dynamic, rebellious, and lyrical,” Ogarkova notes.
The scholar noted that through education and exposure, little by little, Ukrainian youth had begun to appreciate the value of the Ukrainian language, especially in the face of Russia, which “does not accept the existence of an independent, free, and authentic Ukraine.”
The Russian switch
Russian remains widely spoken in Ukraine, despite policies promoting Ukrainian. Some speak Russian because they had a Russian education, some for its perceived prestige and others are ethnic Russians speaking their mother tongue.
The use of the Russian language in Ukraine remains hotly contested, with some perceiving it as a hangover of Russian Imperialism, and others regarding it as a lingua-franca for inter-ethnic communication.
Some Ukrainians are now making a conscious effort to ditch the language in favour of Ukrainian, either for political, social, or economic motivations.
Of those most actively ditching the Russian language are Ukraine’s Crimean community. Following Russia’s illegal occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, both Ukrainian and Tatar communities have faced discrimination, deportation and detention by Russian occupying forces.
Russian is the main language of communication in Crimea for both Ukrainian and Tatar communities. Now, with many Crimeans fleeing Russian occupation, the language is being viewed increasingly critically. Many former and current Crimean residents are switching from the language of their invaders and adopting the more inclusive Ukrainian cultural identity.
There are many public figures who have already made the switch, many of whom come from Crimea. Tatar figures include pop star and former Eurovision competitor Jamala, actor and director Akhtem Seitablaiev, and film director Nariman Aliev, who all made the switch from Russian to Ukrainian after the Russian occupation of their homeland.
Even non-native Crimeans are dropping their native tongue. Former adviser to the head of the Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine, Sergey Kostynskyi, was born in Simferopol into a Russian-speaking Ukrainian family. In outrage after the annexation of Crimea, he abandoned the Russian language and became a passionate advocate for Ukrainian.
“I was born in the early 80s in Crimea,” Kostynskyi writes. “And was brought up in a Russian-speaking environment…there were no Ukrainian-language kindergartens or schools.”
“In Crimea, me and my parents spoke Russian… Everything changed in 2014, after the Russian occupation of Crimea. This event became, for me, a symbolic rape, a form of humiliation. One day my hometown, Simferopol, became a stranger to me.”
Kostynskyi initially remained in Crimea but left after persecution of Ukrainians and Tatars became unbearable and soon decided to ditch the Russian language, including music and books in Russian.
“Immediately, from the first days of the occupation, I agreed with my mother exclusively in Ukrainian… I refused to listen to and watch Russian music and movies… Since 2014, I have been studying my native Ukrainian language, the language of my parents, our native culture and history,” Kostynskyi stated.
As noted by Kostynskyi, it appears the Russian language, as a cultural product, is declining in Ukraine because of Russian aggression and imperialism.
For Sovsun, Ogarkova, and Kostynskyi the Ukrainian language, above all, is illustrative of their distinct identity. For these advocates leading the charge for Ukrainization, Ukrainian has become a cultural cornerstone for their vision for an independent, modern, and European Ukraine, which is linguistically and culturally distinct from Russia.
