The Internet in Ukrainian
While the demand for the Ukrainian language in the global net is growing, the Ukrainian community is lagging behind in both real and virtual life
Euronews, one of the most known world news companies has recently started broadcasting in Ukrainian. This event was timed to the 20th Ukraine’s Independence anniversary. Even the President Viktor Yanukovych congratulated the Ukrainians with the release of the Ukrainian version. However, Euronews had switched to Ukrainian earlier, on August 17. Such rapidity is typical for the Internet that now rivals the traditional mass-media.
The videoblogger and student of the Kyiv Karpenko-Kary University of Theater, Cinema and Television Khrystyna Danylova has presented her own patriotic video “The Ukrainian Language Is So Beautiful.” According to the information from the website of the NGO “Ne Bud Baiduzhym!” [“Don’t Keep Out!” – Ed.], over 80,000 users have watched this video in various social nets. The video has drawn a wide positive response among the Russian-speaking audience as well. Although this number is not that high for the Internet, reaching it on the television would have been yet more difficult. The popular channels are unwilling to show the social, moreover, patriotic advertisements during the prime-time. The youth is integrating into the net more and more. At the beginning of 2011, over 54 percent of Ukrainians had access to the Internet.
According to the information from the website telekritika.ua, today over 30 percent of queries at Yandex are in Ukrainian. Its main competitor, Google Inc. has already offered the Ukrainian version of its new product which is the social net Google+. The Russian social net Vkontakte.ru allowed switching its interface into Ukrainian back in February 2008. Facebook is currently beta-testing the Ukrainian language. Although Twitter has not offered its Ukrainian version yet it is currently taking a vote for users to support their language in the list of the possible interface languages.
UKRAINE-2012
Euro-2012, just like any other event of such scale, is an opportunity to draw attention of the whole world to Ukraine and everything Ukrainian. Certainly, repairing the roads, building the stadiums and making dumplings for the foreign visitors is an important endeavor if we want the people to come back to our country after the championship. A lot of people will emphasize that Euro-2012 is a boost for the economic development, but is it a chance to promote our culture? The championship itself cannot play this role since the tourists will be concerned with football. No matter how much borshch they eat, they will not sing Ukrainian songs: if they learn our language they will do it before they come to Ukraine and mainly on the Internet without paying for it.
There are people who explore the promising Internet sources in this field. For example, the company Literra providing linguistic services for foreigners whose employees took the initiative to add the Ukrainian language to the translation portal WordReference that is among the most visited websites of the world and currently offers translations into 12 most popular languages. In the summer the employees of the company worked on a voluntary basis in their free time and assured that WordReference will shortly allow learning the rudiments of the Ukrainian lexis and phraseology. The forthcoming championship contributed to the creation of the website twiua.com which is the map of the Ukrainian Twitter users with the exclamation points on the cities that will host Euro-2012.
THE INTERNET UKRAINIZATION
As for the promotion of the Ukrainian language and culture, the Internet takes a lead among the strategic development directions in this field, but the point is not only to create the Ukrainian websites but spread Ukrainian as the interface language of the world net giants. There are some reasons for this. Firstly, the possibilities of the foreign websites exceed the potential of the domestic ones. Competing with the leaders will take a lot of time, money and efforts.
Secondly, large global services and websites such as Google are already more Ukrainian than some of the websites created in Ukraine. For example, the website uol.ua is formally a bilingual Ukrainian-Russian service. In fact, reading its blogs is enough to understand that this website is Russian-language.
Finally, why should we compete with the world giants? The abovementioned Facebook is a significant part of the world space even if this space is virtual. Instead of creating our own “original Ukrainian” websites (with the limited number of users, small budget and poor design) we should concentrate on widening the usage of the Ukrainian language in the existing Internet projects. The contributors of the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia give an example of this work. Wikipedia.org.ua is not only the largest storage of information in Ukrainian; it is rapidly developing leaving behind other language versions of the Free Encyclopedia.
In order to develop and promote the Ukrainian language we do not need to unite around something ours and native (moreover, we do not need the foreigners to come for our dumplings) but to supply a lot of high-quality Ukrainian information product to the world even if this world is virtual.
