2fer Revision: Ukrainian Linguistic Identity

Ukrainian Linguistic Identity

Over the past year, there has been civil unrest in the former Soviet Republic country of Ukraine, which recently went through a semi-violent change in government. The coup was sparked by the governments move to work with Russia, rather than the European Union. As a result, a bloody civil war has began in the Russian speaking eastern regions, with Russian backed separatists taking control of the region. Ukraine is made of many nationalities, with ethnic Russians being the second largest population in the country, and Russian is still a very popular language, being the main language in most of east Ukraine. The ethnic population there would like to keep their ties to Russia and their language, which is threatened by the attempts to mandate Ukrainian in the country. Despite the current ceasefire and granting of special administrative status to said regions, ethnic tension, as well as the divide between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers, will remain, as they always have. The divided ethnolinguistic identity and the instability of Ukraine does not just involve the Ukrainian leadership wanting to combat Russian influence, but the unresolved tensions between Russia and the West from the cold war.

The population of Ukraine currently have Ukrainian as their main language, with Russian being an official regional language in the areas of Luhansk, Donetsk, and the Crimean peninsula, which was recently lost to Russia. The most recent statistics stand at Ukrainian (official) 67%, Russian (regional language) 24%, other (includes small Romanian-, Polish-, and Hungarian-speaking minorities) 9% [CIA]. Russian is a major minority language within Ukraine, and around 24 percent or more Ukrainians speak Russian as their main language. Meanwhile, 17.3 percent of Ukraine’s population identified as ethnic Russian in 2001. [CIA]. Said population is mostly centered around Donetsk and Crimea. Not surprisingly, they are the territories currently contested in the bloody conflict, and have a history of being Pro-Yanukovych and Pro-Russia.

Russia and Ukraine have a long, complicated history. During most of the past thousand years, most of the area that we call Ukraine today has been under Russian rule, either during tsarist times, or as a soviet socialist republic. Of course, the rulers attempted to russify the population. There is an example from Soviet times, where a man who moved to Ukraine from Russia as a child gives his experience: “I am also from Russia... Then we moved here with my parents [to Udy, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine,]... Our village, they were Ukrainians there, a Ukrainian speaking population.... But the school was in Russian... It was discrimination by the teachers, they always accused us of speaking Ukrainian outside the school...”[Borderlands into Bordered Lands] This example, of a village with a Russian School in a Ukrainian village, would attract settlers from Russia. The Russian-Soviet authorities would thus ensure that the village would be “Russified” and maintain a Russian identity. Thus, Russian authorities would homogenize the population of Ukraine, which they called “new russia”, and expand their own claims to it’s land in order to strengthen it’s borders. This strategy was rather common, the most famous example would be the “iron curtain” / “Soviet Bloc” of Europe, established to cushion Russia’s borders against the NATO powers.

One of the big questions when Ukraine finally regained independence was language. Would Ukrainian become the standard, or would the country stick with the ever popular Russian? Laada Bilaniuk, a Ukrainian-American researcher into the topic stated on the matter that: “When people name a language, and describe it as mixed or pure, language becomes the site of struggle over identity, social values, and.... a certain type of ‘cultural correctness’“ [Contested Tongues] We can see the struggle right now, in the form of the current civil war between two worlds, two cultures, that were united in the last moments of the dying empire that created them. Russian social values, which were pushed to expand influence, seem to be doing a good job of that by causing the chaos needed for Russia to expand; push it’s way west, even by a couple hundred miles; and restore it’s “importance” in international politics.

Russian influence, as a result of tensions with the west over the course of Ukraine’s history has caused an ethno-linguistic divide within the country that current events have ripped apart even more and turned said divide into an all out civil war. Although the Ukrainian civil war and ethnolinguistic divide may only seem important to Ukraine and possibly it's neighbors, it should in fact concern anyone who cares about the well being of the world's economy and stability. Both NATO and Russia have made moves to influence Ukraine, with Russia annexing part of the country, and sending proxy troops into other unstable parts. NATO and the European Union wish to have Ukraine join as a member, however Russia does not want either organization to get any closer to it's borders. As such, the conflict between Russia and the Western world can only intensify, thus effecting the entire world.

Works Cited

Bilaniuk, Laada. Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Print.

"World Factbook Ukraine." Central Intelligence Agency. Central Intelligence Agency, n.d. Web. 22 Sept. 2014.