Ukraine's Constitutional Court is to pass judgment on a proposal to remove Russian as one of the country's official languages. Before the recent parliamentary elections 57 outgoing deputies challenged the law on language policy in Ukraine.
Despite long historical, political and cultural ties with Russia — and the fact that Russian is the mother tongue of many in the country — the MPs are determined that Russian should lose its official status as a language that can be used in courts, schools and other institutions in areas of Ukraine where Russian is widely spoken, such as the east and south.
This is the second time Ukrainian deputies are moving to limit the use of Russian. The first attempt came the very next day after the forcible removal of the country's elected president Victor Yanukovich in February 2014. That fateful decision came as proof, if any was needed, of the radical nationalist thrust of the turbulent events in Kiev and sent shock waves through the Russian-speaking communities in east Ukraine.
True, the decision was quickly reversed — conceivably, on advice from western politicians who gave unqualified support to the Kiev ‘revolution' — but this hasty move by the Rada in a highly sensitive area of Ukrainian politics proved crucial in the eventual departure of the Russian-speaking Crimea — and in fanning the flames of insurgency in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
Kiev politicians and commentators insist there is no issue of the Russian language in Ukraine. However, Ukrainian nationalists do not even call the Russian language "Russian". They call it the "language of Russia" (Rossiyska mova as opposed to Ruska mova), thereby stressing the point that it is indeed the language of a foreign country.
One language in a bilingual country?
So how important is it in the Ukraine crisis? Extremely important, if the Ukrainian ‘purist' Irina Farion, a Rada deputy, is to be believed. According to her "we are what we speak" and a true Ukrainian should not speak the language of a foreign country, i.e. Russian. She and other nationalists have no time for the millions of Ukrainian citizens who say they consider Russian to be either their mother tongue or their language of choice.
Another view is that the vast majority of Ukrainians are bilingual, and that the language divisions are therefore somewhat exaggerated.
But despite the bilingual credentials of most Ukrainians, the MPs want the only state language to be Ukrainian, and all official transactions must be carried out in it. Some people go further than that.
A well-known nationalist once showed me what he thought during an interview in a Kiev café around the corner from the Maidan, the scene of anti-government protests. We communicated in Russian, the lingua franca of the former Soviet Union.
But when a waiter came up and addressed us in Russian my companion immediately switched to Ukrainian and gave the waiter a dressing-down for speaking an ‘alien' language. The waiter replied in perfect Ukrainian that he spoke Russian to us because he had heard us speaking it. My Ukrainian contact still told him off, "never mind what language the clients speak, you must not speak Russian here".
What Ukraine's linguistic patriots choose to forget is of course that Russian is the mother tongue of many of their people. And that in Russia itself there are hundreds of languages, many of them classed as official in those Russian autonomies and regions where they are widely spoken. And that there are plenty bilingual or multilingual countries where various tongues coexist quite happily in an official capacity — from Afghanistan and Canada to the Netherlands and Madagascar and from Iraq and Kazakhstan to Belgium and Swaziland.
Ukrainian under threat?
The unfortunate Ukrainian law on the fundamentals of language policy, passed in 2012, introduced a similar concept in Ukraine, designating 17 languages besides Russian as ‘regional'.
This gave limited possibilities, but not rights, to speakers of languages other than Ukrainian, provided they successfully complete a formal procedure for their languages to be recognised as ‘regional'. The law was initiated and voted in by the eponymously named Party of Regions while it was still in power.
But even this half-hearted recognition of Ukraine's language diversity was decried by the then opposition as detrimental to the Ukrainian language. I remember discussing the issue with a group of Ukrainian journalists, who contended that without state support, the Ukrainian language would lose out to Russian as a language of choice among Ukrainians — and even that it would eventually die out.
My companion on a research trip across Ukraine, a media analyst of Scottish heritage, argued passionately — but in vain — that his lack of Gaelic did not make him less Scottish. Our Ukrainian friends insisted that the language defined their culture, national identity and statehood.
Somehow, proponents of these views fail to acknowledge that the culture and identity of East Ukrainians are also defined by the language that they speak, which happens to be, well, Russian.
The law on the fundamentals of language policy in Ukraine in its current form may well deserve to be repealed, since it gives no meaningful rights to any languages but Ukrainian.
But the solution to Ukraine's divisions lies in recognising its linguistic and cultural diversity and enshrining it in its Constitution. Only that will make it possible for the country's constitutional court to rule sensibly on the legality of the country's language laws.
