Lingua Franca

“Why don’t we hear more Ukrainian in Ukraine?” asked our reader Vladyslav Hubko from Zakarpattia. On Wednesday evening I turned on the television to see my old friend Mykhailo Slaboshpytsky (incidentally, one of Ukraine’s most talented literary critics) of the League of Ukrainian Philanthropists explain its annual Petro Jacyk Contest in Ukrainian for schoolchildren. As one who has studied Ukraine and its history for a quarter century and lived here for nine years with a defiantly Ukrainian-speaking wife (from Western Ukraine, of course, and she has only just returned from Kharkiv promoting precisely this contest), I simply could not help but offer my own grasping at the straws of an answer. Why are the French so proud of their language and culture, yet the Ukrainians seemingly so ashamed of theirs? Like good historians everywhere, I look first at history, and, rightly or wrongly, it offers explanations that may or may not be true. And like a good historian, I strongly suspect that they are.

My old friend, George Shevelov, professor emeritus of Columbia University and in his nineties the elder statesman of all Ukrainian linguists everywhere, once wrote that surzhyk, the bastard son of Ukrainian, Russian, and the lingua franca of the local bazaars, can be traced to the late nineteenth century when the Valuev Circular of 1863 and Ems Ukase of 1876 banned the Ukrainian language from the schools and printed page in Imperial Russia. With Russian being the undisputed language of authority, it became fashionable for the locals to throw as many Russian words as they knew into what they were trying to say whenever addressing what the British have traditionally called their betters. Plus Russian was the language of command in the armed forces, and the boys called to do their duty for what they were told was their country came back speaking a facsimile of Russian, the women began to pick it up from their menfolk, and the children from their parents, with the result that even in the villages of most of Ukraine traditionally colorful dialects have been corrupted to the extent that aging emigres from central Ukraine who visit to their native villages sometimes have problems understanding even their own closest relatives. Add to this that since the late 1920s, world culture came in Russian only, so that the Russian language was accepted by many people, consciously or subconsciously, as world culture. Some years ago writer Yury Andrukhovych wrote in this paper about his student days when he was listening to some philosophy professor on the radio deciding to quote Immanuel Kant in the original and began to quote the great German philosopher in Russian. Perhaps it was a slip, but the point remains that for many people here world culture remains Russian culture or at least comes to them through the Russian language, at least until they can manage a smattering of English. Overcoming this inferiority complex that many Ukrainians feel toward things their own is not a matter of time, it is a matter of will and effort but not such official coercion as might risk alienating those who do not speak Ukrainian. As one branded in the Soviet Ukrainian journal Kyiv in 1983 a “patent Ukrainian lover,” I support all those with the will to make the effort. Incidentally, this might just be why the contest on the Ukrainian language among school pupils traditionally includes a brief presentation to one of the winners by me of a memorial portrait of Benjamin Franklin on a hundred dollar bill. I have found that such positive incentives do raise the prestige of the language and encourage young people to want to master it.