KYIV – The Verkhovna Rada adopted a sweeping language law on April 25 that elevates the status of Ukrainian in nearly every facet of life.
A solid majority of 278 lawmakers voted for the bill that makes Ukrainian the sole language in all government activities and for officials while performing official duties. Ukrainian dominance in media, culture and education is also ensured. The bill’s measures don’t apply to private communication or language use in religious ceremonies.
After centuries of suppression by more powerful neighbors whose legacies are still felt today, Ukrainian has become a symbol for the country’s struggle for independence and a key component of identity. Russian, in particular, still dominates as the lingua franca in print and online media as well as in commerce, where menus, labels and outdoor signage still appear mostly in Russian.
After voting for the final version of the bill at 11:02 a.m., national deputies sang the national anthem while former President Viktor Yushchenko and Filaret (Denysenko), the honorary patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, were in attendance.
It will also be outgoing President Petro Poroshenko’s last legislative legacy before Volodymyr Zelensky gets sworn in by June 3.
Facebook/Andriy Parubiy
The tally in Parliament on a far-ranging law that protects and promotes the Ukrainian language. A solid majority of 278 lawmakers voted for it at 11:02 a.m. on April 25.
Speaking in Lviv during a work visit on April 29, Mr. Poroshenko said he will sign the bill as soon as he receives it. It comes into effect two months after it gets published.
“The law on the Ukrainian language does not mean that we want to ‘squeeze’ any other language,” he said. “This is definitely not the case. This law is about protecting our language. For no place in the world, except Ukraine, will it be protected.”
President-elect Zelensky criticized the bill’s spirit by saying “the state should promote the development of the Ukrainian language by creating incentives and positive examples rather than with prohibitions and punishments…”
He furthermore said the bill should have been widely discussed in public, despite the fact that, since the first vote on the bill in October 2018, it had been debated among experts and civil society groups throughout the country.
In addition, more than 2,000 amendments – most of which came from the pro-Russian Opposition Bloc – were considered before the second vote.
The law stipulates that Ukrainian is the only state and official language of Ukraine and that officials down to the local level cannot interfere with its use.
“All categories of public servants, state employees and many others, from the president, members of the government and parliamentarians of all levels, to prosecutors, police officers, judges, teachers and physicians, are obliged to be fluent in Ukrainian and use it in performing their duties,” an analysis by Euromaidan Press stated on April 25.
Ukrainian will be the mandatory language of instruction from the fifth grade onward, but the law doesn’t prohibit private institutions from teaching minority languages like Hungarian or Romanian.
A majority of the population speaks Ukrainian at home and considers it their native language, according to separate polls conducted in the last two years by the Razumkov Center and Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. However, the majority of newspapers and magazines are published in Russian.
In the cultural sphere, the law stipulates that narration should be in Ukrainian at all public events that are held by state entities. Advertisements should be in Ukrainian and their Ukrainian letters should be larger if another language is used. The same applies to museums and exhibitions. Foreign films, including at festivals, should either have Ukrainian subtitles or voiceovers.
In five years, Ukrainian-language quotas should increase to 90 percent for national television channels and 80 percent for regional ones, the Euromaidan analysis stated. Different rules apply for the Crimean Tatar language and “other languages of indigenous peoples.”
Print media must publish at least one version of their publication in Ukrainian; this provision will apply 30 months after the law goes into effect. Places selling print media must ensure that at least 50 percent of their offerings are in Ukrainian. The 24 languages of the European Union and the Crimean Tatar language are exempt from these rules, while Russian isn’t.
Internet media should have a home page in the Ukrainian language.
The half rule also applies to publishing, where half the published titles must be in Ukrainian; a two-year transition period for implementation of this requirement is provided, Euromaidan Press wrote.
“Computer programs sold in Ukraine should have an interface in Ukrainian, English, or an EU language, but not in Russian,” said Euromaidan Press. “This will impact the video game market, in which the main language now is Russian.”
This infographic produced by Euromaidan Press in tandem with the International Renaissance Foundation provides a graphic timeline of historical events related to attempts at limiting or eliminating the use of the Ukrainian language in various forms.
Services must be provided in Ukrainian, but can be provided in other languages upon a customer’s request and if the service provider is capable of providing it.
Administrative fines for non-compliance range from $128 to $447 based on the current currency rate. A national commission will be established to monitor compliance, approve language standards and review language knowledge for candidates seeking government work or citizenship.
Reversal of Yanukovych-era law
The new law fills a legal gap that was left after a controversial language law was passed under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych in 2012, two years before the Euro-Maidan Revolution ousted him.
It cynically used the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages that is designed to protect lesser used languages in a country. Thus, it allowed Russian to replace Ukrainian as an official regional language where at least 10 percent of an ethnic minority resides.
Soon after Mr. Yanukovych abandoned office and fled to Russia in late February 2014, the Verkhovna Rada passed a bill that was meant to repeal the 2012 law, but that bill was never ratified.
Still, Russia used the Rada’s attempted repeal of the language law as an excuse to annex Crimea the following month and stoke an armed uprising in southeastern Ukraine to “protect” Russian speakers.
Ukrainian as second-rate
Centuries of “Polonization” and “Russification” policies suppressed Ukrainian and relegated it to an inferior level throughout much of Ukraine.
Most notable is the 1863 circular issued by Minister of Internal Affairs Pyotr Valuev during Russian tsarist rule.
Essentially, it employed “tools and methods… by the imperial Russian government to reverse the upward trajectory of the Ukrainian language towards full functionality as a standard language,” wrote linguists Michael Flier and Andrea Graziosi for the 35th volume of the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies published in 2017-2018.
The linguists noted how imperial Russian policy, including the more severe Ems Decree of 1876 that was amended five years later, secretly banned the Ukrainian language in print.
Valuev also sought to demean Ukrainian by saying “there has not been, is not, and cannot be any special Little Russian language,” and claiming that “the dialect as used by the common folk is the very same Russian language, only corrupted by Poland’s influence on it.”
Yet the linguists noted that the two languages were distinct as far back as 1654 when Ukrainian Kozak leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky negotiated an alliance with the Russian tsar. They noted that during the negotiations between the Kozaks and Muscovites, for example, “interpreters (tolmachi) were needed for both sides.”
Another example they provided was when writer Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol) included a Ukrainian-Russian word list “in his Russian-language ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’ of 1831-1832.”
Ukrainian enjoyed a renaissance in the 1920s under early Soviet rule and it was standardized in 1927 when linguists of western and Soviet Ukraine gathered in Kharkiv to establish an orthography, according to the Harvard Ukrainian Studies Institute.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin reversed the “Ukrainianization” policies in the 1930s during the Holodomor that killed millions of Ukrainians. The language was “Russified” with the hard “g” letter being removed, among other changes.
“This policy of Russian dominance continued until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991,” Drs. Flier and Graziosi said, even though Ukrainian was by then the official state language.