OR When people don’t feel at home in their mother tongue any longer

One of the August 2022 issues of The Economist featured a short but interesting article about the language situation in Ukraine. A joke serves to illustrate the rather complex issue: Two old Odessites meet and one of them suddenly starts speaking in Ukrainian. “What’s the matter?” asks his friend. “Are you afraid of Ukrainian nationalists?” “No”, he replies, “I’m afraid to speak Russian – in case Putin thinks he needs to liberate me.”

In Odessa, like in many cities in Ukraine, and the regions in the south and east, Russian is the dominant language, while the west of the country is largely Ukrainophone. Many Ukrainians are perfectly or near bilingual, and there are some in-between regions where Surzhyk is spoken, a mix of the two languages (which by the way are rather more different, both in vocabulary and grammar than most of us may think). Putin has dismissed Ukrainian as a regional linguistic peculiarity, conveniently glossing over the fact that the two languages go back to a common ancestor, Old East Slavic, but have gone their separate ways for some 400 years. Ukrainian is not a “primitive” variety of Russian that countryfolk speak!

And while this bilingual and bi-cultural situation was always somewhat complex and ambivalent, and certainly difficult to understand for outsiders, it was something the inhabitants of the country lived with, quite happily, I am told. Ukrainians did feel connected to the great names of Russian literature, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and Bulgakov (the latter two of Ukrainian origin). They switched between the two languages with ease, perhaps in the way that many Catalans switch between Catalan and Spanish in their everyday lives. The two languages co-existed.

But all this changed quite drastically over the past 6 months. The Economist reports that Ukrainians who traditionally spoke Russian and were less fluent in Ukrainian, or not used to actively using it, now attend Ukrainian refresher and conversation classes. Many Ukrainians are making special efforts to learn or brush up their Ukrainian. Why? Because they find it painful or even impossible to speak the language of the invaders.

One of these who says that Russian for him has become a pornographic language is Volodymyr Rafeyenko, an award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator and film critic. He graduated from Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and until very recently published all his work exclusively in Russian. After the outbreak of Russian aggression in Ukraine’s east, he left Donetsk and settled near Kyiv, writing his first novel in Ukrainian, Mondegreen (now out in an English translation by Mark Andryczyk), a poetic essay about displacement and being a refugee in one’s own country.

Rafeyenko, winner of various Russian literary prizes says he can no longer write in the language that is spoken by the nation whose aim is to annihilate the Ukrainian people and culture. For him, the Russian language has become the language of evil, of lies and of cynicism. “The people who are coming to kill you speak in your language”, he says in an interview*. Before 2014, he states, “it never entered my mind to write in Ukrainian. But after 2014, I learned Ukrainian and wrote a novel in Ukrainian”. His aim at the time was to alternative between writing novels in Russian and Ukrainian – precisely to demonstrate that there was no problem with the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, that this problem never existed. That the idea that Russian soldiers had to come and “liberate” Russian individuals and families was blatant nonsense.

However, on February 24, 2022, he had a change of mind. He took the firm decision never again to publish a single text in Russian. It was simply impossible for him. The thought that he might be seen as a Russian writer because he writes in Russian is for him “intolerable”.

Going back to the article in The Economist, apparently the switch from Russian to Ukrainian is accelerating in all areas of the country. While ten years ago 42% called Russian their native language, this number has now decreased to 20%. Only 7% now think it would be a good idea to make Russian a state language, compared to 25% before the war. Interestingly also, President Zelensky, a Russophone (just like Rafeyenko), used to struggle with Ukrainian, but now seems to master it proficiently.

One of our linguists at ALPHA is a Ukrainian who was born in the Donbas region, at some point (2014) moved to Kyiv and is now in Cambridgeshire/UK. She explains that the Donbas was a region rich in coal and ore that attracted people from all over Ukraine, but also from Russia and other countries who were looking for work (and perhaps fortune). This meant that Russian became a kind of lingua franca for everyone – one of the main reasons why Russian is so dominant there. She also explains that some families, particularly in the more rural areas, managed rather better than city dwellers to preserve Ukrainian as their principal language.

As a professional translator, she tells me, she was working both with Russian and Ukrainian, depending on the type of project and on the client. Legal and formal documents went into Ukrainian, while technical materials, aimed at engineers, were most frequently translated into Russian. She confirms that until 2014 both languages were readily used as a means of communication, and not abused as “weapons”. Among friends, someone might be speaking in Ukrainian, but getting the response in Russian, or even in Surzhyk. For her, personally, but also for many others, this dramatically changed in February 2022. With those events, Russian turned into the invaders’ language overnight, and this meant that Ukrainians of all ethnicities who would normally speak Russian started switching to Ukrainian, not least to make a clear distinction between fake and genuine news. She goes as far as to say that Ukrainian became a “not-so-secret password – a tool for checking and identifying Russian saboteurs and soldiers, because all Ukrainians can speak and understand both Ukrainian and Russian to some extent”, while that is not the case with Russians (who normally have difficulties particularly with the pronunciation). She says that she can totally understand Ukrainians who choose to “forget Russian as a form of protest against the Russian aggression” and goes on to state that if she and her family had remained in Kyiv, they would have made that very same decision.

Our translator has a lot more to say about this tragic but interesting situation, and I hope she will be sharing some of the details with us sometime soon.

*You can read the interview here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/ukraine-war-impact-on-russian-writer-by-volodymyr-rafeyenko-and-marci-shore-2022-06