Will the Ukrainian language survive?

The closer we get to the elections, the greater our desire to isolate ourselves from all that informational muck spilling every day from television screens, radios, publications, and Web sites. We seem to be living in a kind of vacuum in which every type of information is aimed at popularizing certain political parties and blocs.

Especially irksome are the spin doctors guiding the campaign to grant Russian the status of Ukraine’s second official language. The Party of Regions, the socialists, and the communists are self-styled “mouthpieces” of the people’s will - although no one seems to have ascertained that will. On the one hand, it is an understandable political move, as most of the electorate in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine use Russian. On the other hand, the latest census says that 70 percent of Ukraine’s inhabitants claim Ukrainian as their mother tongue. A collision emerges. Or maybe the trouble is that the state is consciously ignoring cultural problems, particularly the language one.

Historically, Left-Bank Ukraine was subjected to a greater degree of assimilation and propaganda of Russophilic trends. Hence the striking difference between Ukraine’s western and eastern territories. Unlike Lviv, where Russian-language schools can be counted on the fingers of one hand, there are many Russian-language schools in Luhansk oblast, where Ukrainian schools total a mere 23 percent.

In southern Ukraine, especially in the Crimea, the situation is even worse. I was vacationing in Yevpatoria last summer and addressed an old woman in Ukrainian. She responded in Russian by saying: “ Govorite po-chelovecheski,” speak a human language. True, this happened under the previous president, but I am not sure that anything will change there. Western Ukraine is Ukrainized to a greater degree, but once again, this is not the result of a national policy, but rather a historical peculiarity of the Right Bank, where the assimilationist factor has not reached the all-embracing scale it has on the Left Bank.

Finding a way out of this situation seems very problematic, especially now that certain politicians are adding fuel to the fire of the bilingual issue, sowing seeds of discord and intolerance between Ukrainians living in the west and east.

The language problems in Ukraine are somewhat reminiscent of France’s after World War II, when the French language was threatened by English assimilation. The French government immediately responded by enacting a number of laws restricting the screening of Hollywood movies throughout France, setting a limit on the use of foreign terminology by journalists, and ordering all levels of the bureaucracy to use only French.

These measures met with varying responses; not all citizens approved, but they proved to be a balanced solution to a political problem, and politicians were not going to change it. France has still not ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages because its clauses run counter to the French constitution. The latter officially protects only the French language. Other languages are not guaranteed any official rights, yet this does not prevent France from financing the teaching of other languages and creative projects, because they cannot threaten the official language.

It is worth recalling Italy’s historical experience, when a mere 47 percent of the population could speak and write Italian before Garibaldi appeared on the scene. Italians succeeded in reviving their almost forgotten mother tongue. Italian was consistently introduced into every walk of life, using mottos like, “We created Italy — we’ll create the Italian nation!”

In my opinion, it is the Ukrainian language, not Russian, that needs protection and financing; it is common knowledge that 90 percent of the book market consists of Russian publications. The same is true of films. Will the Ukrainian language survive in such conditions, especially if the bureaucrats on all levels are allowed to speak Russian? Hardly.