Volume 2010, Issue 201

This article analyzes perceptions of the language situation and reported language practices in the Eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. The article utilizes Pierre Bourdieu's concept of legitimate language to analyze a complex language situation in which several languages may be designated as legitimate. This term may not only refer to a language that is endorsed by state institutions, but also to a variety that one is expected to use in certain settings, i.e., the language variety that is seen as constituting the norm. The article demonstrates that the Ukrainian language can be a salient marker of national identification, but that Russian is considered appropriate in most domains. The concepts of identification and utility are introduced, as they may add to an understanding of how the notion of a legitimate language is constructed.

This article presents the results of qualitative research conducted among representatives of young Russian-speaking intelligentsia in Lviv. After introducing the historical background and the current language situation of the city, it examines the role and status of the minority and majority languages in the language practices of the interviewees. Other issues addressed in this text are cultural and ethnic/national identifications, and their relationship with language practice and language identification. The results of the research illustrate that in this particular group of interviewees, there was a tendency to integrate into the majority Ukrainian culture, and in some cases, to change identification. For some, cultural identification was double and did not always correspond with an ethnic or national identification; however, another part of the group preserved both language and ethnic distinction. Also of importance was the existence of a group with a marginal identification, in this case those who felt neither Russian nor Ukrainian.

The Zakarpattia region in southwestern Ukraine is stereotyped as an area of great linguistic diversity, with a number of discrete ethnic groups speaking their eponymous languages, as well as a range of local Slavic varieties that are variably perceived as dialects of Ukrainian or deployed as evidence of long-standing links to another Slavic language, Rusyn. In this article, I focus on the ways in which different language ideologies mediate language use, and perceptions of that use by Zakarpattia residents. In the first half of the article, I focus on the conceptualization of language and ethnicity as being in natural alignment as one of the key ideological positions that unite differing political orientations toward the classification of languages in Zakarpattia. In the second half of the article, I describe a set of local language ideologies and consider how these ideologies govern the interpretation of everyday language use between members of groups that are variably defined as similar or different depending on context.

The media is a crucial site of the articulation, contestation, and inculcation of beliefs about language, or language ideologies. In media discourse, these ideologies are not only represented in actors' and journalists' judgments about language matters, but also realized in the actual use of language. This article analyzes ideologies of language use which are articulated and embodied in contemporary Ukrainian media discourse. By examining both the presentation of language processes in society and the language practices of the media itself, I show how this discourse presents a rather ambivalent idea of the actual and appropriate language use in post-Soviet Ukraine. On the one hand, Ukrainian is assumed to be the only/primary language of the state and society, a symbolic marker of the nation, and a language that (all) citizens identify with; on the other, Russian appears to be an (equally) acceptable language of virtually all social practices. Thus the media both reflects an ambivalent normality that Ukrainian citizens inherited from the Soviet times and reproduces it in the interests of the dominant political and media elites.

The practice of speaking one's preferred language, Ukrainian or Russian, regardless of the language spoken by one's interlocutor has become widespread in media and public life in Ukraine since independence. I refer to this practice as “non-accommodating bilingualism,” since for communication to occur the participating individuals are necessarily bilingual to some degree, but neither accommodates by switching to the language spoken by the other. In this article I investigate the prevalence, variety, and significance of non-accommodating bilingualism in Ukraine, with particular focus on television talk and game shows. I argue that while in some ways bilingual non-accommodation functions to defuse the contested issue of language choice, it can also perpetuate existing linguistic inequalities and tensions. Even in conversations where speakers are free to speak whichever language they prefer, the politics of Ukrainian and Russian language and ethnicity continue to be engaged.

This article is an analysis of the ongoing language debate in Ukraine. I assert that in Ukraine, unlike in Belgium or Canada to which Ukraine is often compared, the substance of language politics does not lie in opposition between language groups or between their representatives. In fact, due to the absence of clearly defined language groups, political discussions concerning language in Ukraine are not a symptom of the language structuring, but its main agent. The heated political debates regarding languages are not driven by divergent interests or group attitudes, but by conflicting agendas for the protection of languages. Therefore, in the article I emphasize the core positions of the discourses — the presentations of the language groups and their agendas. This includes both the Russophile and the Ukrainophile camps, in which one may discern various visions and action plans of the language groups that these camps claim to represent. As the analysis of their arguments shows, tensions in the language sphere lie not only in their conflicting agendas of language grouping from the standpoint of one language, Russian or Ukrainian, but in the competition concerning the very identity and even existence of the represented groups.

The contemporary trends in the processes of codification of Ukrainian are influenced by numerous different factors. Today's rise of activity in the sphere of language reform is an attempt to resolve rather old cultural and ideological conflicts. Ukrainian linguistic purism mostly manifests itself not in the elimination of lexical borrowings, but in a negative attitude toward bookish elements on a stylistic level. At the same time, in orthography, the struggle for language purity is concentrated on the transliteration of borrowings from Greek, Latin, and other European languages. Whether they focus on the redistribution of stylistic variants or variants of loanword spelling, the language ideologies discussed in this article symbolically underscore cultural distances. An analysis of cultural models and language ideologies associated with them bears witness to the particular role of the romantic and European models in the history of Standard Ukrainian. These models are aimed at reaffirming and consolidating the separatist, divergent function of Standard Ukrainian as one of the fundamental means of supporting the Ukrainian national identity.