The Ukrainian language: its prospects for the future (08/11/96)

The Ukrainian language: its prospects for the future

by Michael S. Flier

As we approach the year 2001, the end of the 20th century and the second millennium of the common era, we have grown accustomed to hearing apocalyptic prophecies at every turn. Ukraine, which has gained independence a mere decade before we all march into this fearsome abyss, does not escape the great sweep of pessimism about the future. As The New York Times reminded us recently (June 27), despite good intentions on the part of the West, especially the United States, Ukraine's star is fading: "Once rich and powerful, Ukraine is now neither."

The unsubstantiated claim about Ukraine's former wealth and power (what period could the author have in mind?) feeds a myth and makes the message that much more ominous: so goes the economy, so goes the nation, so goes the nation, so goes its culture. Can the Ukrainian language be far behind? Pundits unable to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union seem to have gained 20-20 vision in time to predict the fading (and impending collapse?) of Ukraine.

I adhere to the simpler wisdom of that great exponent of Western philosophical optimism, former New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, who said: "It ain't over 'til it's over."

The future of Ukrainian is integrally tied to its function in the Ukrainian state. One of the burning issues of Ukrainian political life in the last decade has been the question of a state language. Should Ukraine, as an independent state, have one official language - Ukrainian - or two - Ukrainian and Russian? In this nation of roughly 52 million inhabitants, nearly 73 percent of the population is self-identified as Ukrainian; slightly over 22 percent identify themselves as Russian, with roughly 5 percent consisting of such ethnic groups as Poles, Jews, Belarusians, Moldovans, etc.

According to Dominique Arel, who completed a dissertation in 1994 at the University of Illinois on language policy and ethnicity in Ukraine, 80 percent of the Russians in Ukraine live in the urban areas of the eastern and southern industrial regions. Moving across Ukraine from west to east, especially from the Dnipro to the east, one thus notes a steep rise in the percentage of self-identified Russians. In the 1989 census, self-identified Ukrainians constitute 90 percent of the Lviv region, but only 51 percent of the Donetske region of Donbas, and only 26 percent of the Crimea. According to Dr. Arel, virtually all Ukrainians living in the urban areas of the east and south use the Russian language in public, and over 40 percent of them living in regional capitals such as Kharkiv and Donetske consider Russian their mother tongue.

Of course, these figures present an oversimplified view of a quite complex phenomenon. A classification of the populace in strict ethnic and linguistic categories is suspect from the start, simply because those interviewed are usually given a narrow range of options for each response, typically a categorical yes or no, or column a or column b. Self-identification is undoubtedly important; what people feel themselves to be ethnically often finds a greater resonance in real life than what they actually are in strict ethnographic terms. But such narrow categories as "Ukrainian" and "Russian" and "Jewish" do not come to grips with the consequences of men and women as social animals.

How, for example, is the child of a self-identified Ukrainian mother and self-identified Russian father raised by a self-identified Jewish aunt in Odessa to answer the question, "What is your nationality?" Of course, whatever the child answers will be "correct," and yet that answer conceals a complexity that may have consequences for other factors in the linguistic equation.

Likewise the notion of mother tongue - "ridna mova" or "rodnoi yazyk" - can be a slippery one indeed, depending on how one interprets the adjective. Quite apart from the sentimental evocation of the term itself, mother tongue may mean different things to different people.

Is a mother tongue the language one is born into and begins to speak (this begs the issue of bi- or multilingual households) or the default language that one uses in "neutral" situations as the most "natural"? How many children have lost their first language to another after parents have moved to a new setting in which the first language is not understood or stigmatized, so that the child in effect loses it?

"Mother tongue" is a loaded and confusing term, which, when taken together with vague, imprecise ethnic labels themselves, makes all statistics based on them dubious from the start.

As a scholar especially interested in the historical development of the East Slavic languages, I have a keen interest in dialectology and what it can tell us about linguistic change. But I am well aware that an analysis is only as good as the evidence on which it is based. If dialect maps are inaccurate or ambiguous or misleading, the analysis is compromised. Before we can make real sense of the language situation in Ukraine, we need a clearer framework against which to juxtapose categories like ethnicity (nationality) and linguistic identity.

Language identification, like sexuality, is apparently not a simple binary phenomenon. Information about the capacity of each citizen of Ukraine to speak and comprehend Ukrainian and Russian, along with gradient assessments of these skills, would present a rough but certainly more accurate "Kinsey scale" of linguistic Ukraino-Russianicity than the simple categories of Ukrainian and Russian used now. A more nuanced measure would not only throw into greater relief the linguistic evidence for national policy, but would also help to clarify the relationship of the understudied language hybrid known as "surzhyk," the speakers of which are typically not fluent in a "standard" version of either Ukrainian or Russian. Alas, statistics "of the third kind" are not available.

Compared with other states of the former Soviet Union, such as Estonia and Lithuania, Ukraine has held to a fairly reasonable and flexible linguistic policy. The language law put into effect by the Communist Parliament in 1989 established Ukrainian as the sole state language ("derzhavna mova"), but contained a provision that allowed another language to function alongside Ukrainian in areas where a non-Ukrainian ethnic group constitutes a majority. President Kuchma's call for the establishment of Russian as an official language of Ukraine ("ofitsiyna mova") in his 1994 inaugural address met with tremendous opposition and was later dropped from his official agenda. The new Constitution approved on June 28 by the Parliament preserves the special status of Ukrainian in Ukraine. Ukrainian alone is named specifically in Article 10 as the state language, parenthetically defined as "official" ("ofitsiyna"). This is a fact of great moment.

Despite cries from Communists and Socialists for a two-language policy, the existing policy has had the beneficial effect of elevating the status of Ukrainian in affairs of state, in the Ukrainian mass media, and in Ukrainian culture in general. Official government documents are increasingly printed in Ukrainian. More and more television and radio programs are broadcast in Ukrainian. Slowly but surely, Ukrainian is being established as an indispensable means of communication in Ukraine. At the same time, the policy in Ukraine has avoided the threatening gestures against Russian characteristic of extreme language policies such as those in the Baltic countries, which have issued a demand to learn the state language or leave. Such hostility creates fear, resistance and retaliation.

Although the original language law contains broad temporal limits on the establishment of Ukrainian as the state language in specific areas - for example, three to five years in government administration and technology, five to 10 years in higher education - strict enforcement has not been the order of the day.

Apparently, the best way to ensure the vitality and growth of Ukrainian in Ukraine is to concentrate energies on the creation of a living culture of great quality and broad appeal, one whose benefits will attract the interest of all of Ukraine's citizens, despite their self-identified ethnicity. Begin the broadcasting of "Dynasty" and "Santa Barbara" in Ukrainian, and the government permits Ukraine to join a goodly portion of the rest of the world in watching popular soap operas in the official state language. Produce excellent Ukrainian financial journals and newspapers such as the Lviv-based Halytski Kontrakty, and they will compete seriously with their Russian-language counterparts such as Finansovaia Ukraina. Publish high-quality translations of great books of Western civilization into Ukrainian such as those in the Osnovy series, and the runs will be sold out almost immediately. The cultural and commercial elites of Ukraine have an unprecedented opportunity to play major roles in promoting the use of Ukrainian.

The debate that has raged over Ukrainian-Russian hegemony in Ukraine, especially since President Kuchma's inaugural speech, will continue for some time. But the Ukrainian language, now strengthened on a legal, constitutional basis, has the opportunity to root itself more firmly in modern Ukrainian politics, culture and everyday life. Success will be measured in decades, however, not years. The passing of the new Constitution is a major early milestone in this gradual process. It is the new generations of speakers, best able to free themselves from some of the ethnic biases of the past, who will command the future of the Ukrainian language.

A promising sign for such a future is seen in the statistics on primary education and the introduction of Ukrainian-language schools into the school systems across Ukraine. Dr. Arel (Nationalities Papers, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1995) cites figures from the Ministry of Education claiming that in one year, between 1991-1992 and 1992-1993, the proportion of children in Ukrainian schools jumped from 45.1 percent to 51.4 percent. In Kyiv, the transformation was even more dramatic: whereas in 1988-1989, four-fifths of the students were enrolled in Russian schools, by 1993-1994, more than four-fifths of the first graders (88 percent) were being instructed in Ukrainian. Even in an eastern city such as Kharkiv, 24 schools out of roughly 160 in 1993 admitted students to Ukrainian-based classes. In contrast, only two such schools existed in 1991. The emergence of Ukrainian schools is also a fact in such Russian strongholds as Donetske, Dnipropetrovske and Odessa.

The government policy on upgrading the status and privileges of Ukrainian schools has also persuaded the authorities in some Russian schools to change their format to Ukrainian, especially in the western and central regions of Ukraine. Furthermore, in accordance with current language policy, all institutions of higher education will have to shift to exclusive use of Ukrainian by the year 2000. If such an educational policy continues, there will presumably be less consternation about Ukrainian as the state language of Ukraine, especially among those speakers now educated in Ukrainian who typically use Russian in their private life.

It is not only through policies on the mass media and education that the government must act to help the cause of Ukrainian in Ukraine. It is vital that high grammatical and stylistic standards be maintained as well, and this can only come from government investment in the development of linguistic expertise and the promulgation of literary Ukrainian throughout the land.

In Literaturna Ukraina (June 13), Oleksandr Tarenko recently called for government aid to sustain the Ukrainian linguistic enterprise. As the director of the Ukrainian Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences, he lamented that salaries have gone unpaid for over a half a year and that scholars who should be producing the handbooks and dictionaries that promote the use of proper Ukrainian are instead working at other jobs to make ends meet. The government must not abandon the cause of literary Ukrainian at this important juncture in the history of Ukraine.

What makes the Ukrainian linguistic situation unusual and theoretically interesting is that the two languages, Ukrainian and Russian, are genetically so close, thus providing great opportunity for mutual interference, although for cultural and political reasons the influence in the modern period has typically come from Russian. Linguistic similarity suggests that the Ukrainian-Russian juxtaposition cannot be meaningfully compared with English and French in Canada, or the more ominous Irish and English in Ireland, where Gaelic has been reduced to a provincial status and is only lately being resuscitated among some groups as a mark of heritage and linguistic pride.

Adult speakers of Ukrainian or Russian with some knowledge of the other are often lulled into thinking that because of the similarity, they understand more than they actually do, or can speak better than they actually can. If unsure of a particular word or construction in one language, such speakers face the clear temptation of assuming identity and reproducing the word or construction they already know with the necessary changes in sound and form.

A vivid instance of such linguistic calquing is reported by a reader in a strongly worded letter sent to Literaturna Ukraina (September 15, 1994). The author notes that a public radio announcer used "V Kyievi visim hodyn" - "the time in Kyiv is eight o'clock" [literally, eight hours] instead of the grammatically correct "V Kyievi vos'ma hodyna" [literally, the eighth hour]. The writer laments:

"The fabric of our state is eaten away by corruption, bribery, drunkenness, narcomania, cultural betrayal and depravity. Impediments emerge in the most unexpected places, now in the form of ideas about an official Russian language, federalism or transparent borders, now in the form of interconfessional confrontations, a flood of pornography, vulgar eroticism, the 'White Brotherhood' or covert Russianizing."

If the state radio announcers are only trying to win the favor of the new president [Kuchma], he opines, "they might as well bypass the Uke (khokhliatskyi) surzhyk form "visim hodyn" and go directly to the Russian "vosem chasov."

It is time that the government show as much passion about the correct use of Ukrainian in Ukraine by establishing a comprehensive policy that supports the standardization (an enormous but necessary task) and the spread of literary Ukrainian throughout the nation. With such government effort supplementing the active growth of Ukrainian in all aspects of life and culture, the Ukrainian language will have a brighter future than some political prognosticators might think. It is time to make that commitment.

Michael S. Flier is Oleksander Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology at Harvard University. Published here are excerpts from remarks delivered on June 29 at a roundtable discussion on Ukraine, organized to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Ukrainian Summer Institute at Harvard University.

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