The Language Dilemma - Ukrainian, Russian, and Other Languages

After listening to an amazing TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the danger of a single story, I started thinking about my story and of course, as it has been happening for the past year, I'm reflecting back on what events at home mean to me as a person and as a Ukrainian through the language debate.

Writing this piece in English is most comfortable to me after using it for the past four years to express my thoughts as an undergraduate student at DePauw.

When I am thinking of writing my reflections in Russian, I just get too emotional. Not because I hate Russian. It’s the opposite - I have been using this language since my childhood for most of my daily communication because people in my hometown mostly speak Russian. It’s the language I am most comfortable speaking. When I speak my feelings through Russian, I feel them the most. Expressing myself in English helps me to distance myself from emotions and use logic over feelings. I feel like I need that distance to make sense of what have happened in the past and explain part of what is going on in Ukraine through a lense of a Ukrainian person, not a Western media outlet journalist.

When I am thinking of expressing my thoughts in Ukrainian, I feel like I am writing an essay for a class. All of my education was in Ukrainian, so there comes the association. However, if I was asked in a Ukrainian poll what my mother tongue is, I would answer ‘Ukrainian’ because I am Ukrainian. Never mind the fact that in practice I speak Russian more often and with more ease.

I never think of expressing my written thoughts in ‘surzhik’, or a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, used in my family and among our friends that come from the same village that my parents came from. Using ‘surzhik’ is a sign of being an uneducated person that is less respected than a person that speaks pure Ukrainian or Russian (preferably Russian). Surzhik is a language that made some people disrespect my parents. The others felt more educated and worthy of respect because they spoke a pure Russian language (this is in modern Ukraine in my city). This language does not match my straight A school record, numerous academic and social achievements, or my American education that costed about $200,000 in scholarships. People in Ukraine will laugh at me or disrespect me if I use it, so I avoid using it.

And yet, this is the language that I use when I speak with my parents. This is the language that naturally grew within some Ukrainian village people because they were forced to learn another language. They spoke Ukrainian and then had to learn to speak Russian in the U.S.S.R. because the U.S.S.R. policy was to eradicate any cultural components of the people from fifteen republics and replace it by one - Russian. My parents were growing up speaking Ukrainian in the village but were taught in Russian in school and higher education institutions. And thus, the mixing of languages began. It may not be a pure or intelligent-sounding language, but why should we care how it sounds without looking at the reason why people speak it in the first place? Why are we forgetting that someone with power imposed it on people?

If I spoke a mixture of Russian or Ukrainian with English, I don’t think anyone would disrespect me as much though. People would joke that I am forgetting my homeland, but they would not think that I am a less worthy human being. Why would the treatment be different? English sounds fancy. It makes a person look more educated. English has world power and by nature, power can create inequalities. So, English-Russian and English-Ukrainian mixture are more powerful language mixtures than the Russian-Ukrainian mix.

When language debate over whether Ukraine should have Ukrainian or Russian or both as national languages arose, I encountered very heated debates. The debate was so heated that it looked like it split our country into two pieces - the Russian-speaking East and the Ukrainian-speaking West. (This was way before the Euromaidan or before me going to the United States. This was a tactic used by politicians to split the Ukrainian population into two camps or two electoral bodies. The good old 'divide and rule' political tool of gaining power.) Even though I most often spoke Russian, I am a proud Ukrainian and was completely fine having Ukrainian as a national language. Ukraine finally got its chance to be an independent country and for sure has a right to have its own national language after all years of someone saying that the Ukrainian language does not exist.

It was easy for me to read and write documents in Ukrainian because my parents and grandparents still spoke it, I read a lot of books in Ukrainian and studied in Ukrainian. As I realized later, however, many Ukrainian citizens that grew up in the U.S.S.R., for example, spoke mostly Russian and only knew Russian. Many of them maybe were even born in the Russian Soviet republic and moved to Ukraine within what was before a single country - U.S.S.R. So, when Ukraine became independent, they suddenly appeared in a newly born country with a new national language that they didn’t know. On a daily basis, though, it did not matter. One can speak Russian in Ukraine and be completely fine. Most channels have Russian movies, commercials, and so on. But it created problems in terms of understanding Ukrainian-translated movies or labels of some medicine that supposedly were translated only into Ukrainian. And these are the rare times of language trouble that the Ukrainian politicians used to divide Ukraine’s electorate into two camps  - the Ukrainian-speaking West and the Russian-speaking East.

This is the line that foreign people today use to explain the conflict in Ukraine. When I say to foreigners that I am from Ukraine, instead of looking a little confused  (many times people didn't know what Ukraine is or where it is), today they ask me whether I am from the East or West Ukraine, to which I respond, “I am from the North”. Geographically and  culturally, I belong to the northern Ukrainian culture. This identity is related to the history, resources, and nature that have been present in my region. My hometown used to be the headquarters of the Kyivan Rus royalty who later on moved further to the north and built Moscow. My region was one of the first to be added to the Russian Empire and feel its political and social pressure. However, according to the language maps today, I’m from the Western Ukraine.

Even when I was in Ukraine before any protests started but when the language question was a matter of debate, I thought it was a silly debate. I could never align myself with either a Ukrainian-speaking or Russian-speaking side because I was both and thought that deciding on one language was not necessary. Many countries have more than one official language. Ukraine, having a history that brought us to having two languages used quite widely, could have both Ukrainian and Russian languages as their official languages. In practice, most labels on foods have Ukrainian and Russian descriptions already. Media products are in both languages. It’s only the documents that are in Ukrainian that many Russian-speaking people had trouble with.

As I am realizing today, for many Ukrainians, the language question is not just about which language is more or less comfortable to use. For many Ukrainians, Russian is an echo of oppression and of fearful regimes in the U.S.S.R. that killed many Ukrainians and deemed Ukrainian culture and language as a joke and a non-existent dialect. Getting rid of the Russian language is like getting rid of the jail chains and becoming free.

As one can see, the language debate is way more complex for me than what media talks about. It is easier to split Ukraine into West and East to understand it. It is easier to talk about Africa, and not about Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Algeria, Congo, and several dozens of other countries present of the African continent. Simplifying reality may be a technique that people use to understand and deal with reality. And yet, when we miss pieces of the story, when we do not look at complexity, we are bound to keep making mistakes because we acted without full understanding.

The language issue in Ukraine is more complex than East-West split. I believe that the current events in Ukraine go way deeper than just the language debate. However, language is a huge part of a person’s identity. It’s the way we communicate ourselves to the world, express and connect to others. It has a potential to be uniting and destructive. Its power is immense and attractive to politicians. While the debates are going on, I’m trying to look away from the political performance on the theater stage and instead peek behind the curtains. There will most likely be something more than a language debate...