Isn’t there bilingualism in our country?
Several years ago, when I was talking with the Finnish painter Harri Junnila, I asked him where he had learned such good Russian. Junnila explained that he wanted to study Swedish in school, but that his mother, who was working for a travel agency, decided that he should study Russian.
People who point to Ukraine as an example of a bilingual country do not always understand — or pretend not to understand — what they are proposing. It turns out that studying Swedish, the second official language of Finland, is not mandatory. In Ukraine, people who do not master Russian, which is not the second official language, cannot receive their secondary education diplomas. We have countless Russian-language publications. We hear Russian on television and radio. What official status does this language require?
People who support bilingualism are hypocrites. In reality they are striving for unilingualism, seeking to continue the Soviet practice of making Russian crowd out the languages of other peoples who are living in their own lands.
We Ukrainians often accuse ourselves of inferiority. This is true. Is anyone in Russia, especially among the party leaders, campaigning to grant Ukrainian the status of a second official language? On the contrary, Ukrainian schools have long been closed in Russia, in places with a compact Ukrainian population (in the Kuban and the Zelenyi Klyn region), and Ukrainians have been officially registered as Russians. In Ukraine, party leaders waving red flags demand that Russian continue to squeeze out the Ukrainian language, and on this basis they are called leftists for some reason. Why aren’t they demanding that Ukrainian receive the status of a second official language in Russia?
As an all-Ukraine daily, Den serves as an example of Ukrainians’ tolerant attitude to Russians. This newspaper is published in two languages, so anyone can choose their language of preference: Ukrainian or Russian. Is there such a newspaper in Russia?
Ukrainian nationalists are often blamed for worsening our relations with Russia. In fact, the blame should be place on those who are promising to return Ukraine to some new union with Russia and to grant Russian official status. Because of these people Russia’s leadership is under the illusion that, after enough pressure is applied, Ukraine will beg for membership in this union. And they are prepared to carry out the process.
If Ukraine started speaking its mother tongue, if the fifth column of Russian imperialism did not operate in Ukraine, even the Russian government would realize that Ukraine is not Russia.
The language issue is not just a question of communication. It is a matter of statehood and culture. The Ukrainian language has no other terrain but Ukraine. In other countries, where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians live, the Ukrainian language is not official. Ukraine has rid itself of colonial dependence. The highest priority today is to get rid of the vestiges of that dependence. Asserting the Ukrainian language in all spheres of communication in Ukraine is one of the most important requirements of our times.
