The language
situation in Ukraine |
|
Anatolij
Dorodnych (PAP, Słupsk and UAM, Poznań) |
The language
situation in Ukraine has its roots in the imperial policy of tsarist Russia
continued by the Soviet government. That policy was to displace Ukrainian with
Russian. So, gradually it became fashionable and prestigious to speak Russian
while the Ukrainian language came to be looked upon as the language of
peasants, and if Ukrainian intellectuals insisted on using Ukrainian, they were
called ‘nationalists’. The situation with the Ukrainian language was not helped
by the fact that the majority of the population in eastern Ukraine were (and
still are) ethnic Russians.
The
political and economic dependence of Ukraine, the persecution and extermination
of the Ukrainian elite, and forcible russification have resulted in a situation
where several generations of ethnic Ukrainians have spoken Russian as their
first or, sometimes, their only language.
The literary
Ukrainian language now exists as the surviving Soviet-induced standard, and the
emerging new standard informed by the national literature and West-Ukrainian
speech. The latter is gaining in prestige due to the pressure from the
Ukrainian national elite.
Beside the
standard(s) there are two regional vernaculars – eastern and western. While the
western variety has many features common with Polish, the eastern variety uses
more lexical roots common with Russian. There are, of course, some differences
both in morphology and syntax as well as prosody. On the fringe of the eastern
variety of Ukrainian is the so-called ‘surzhyk’,
a creole-like language spoken in the provinces bordering on Russia.
The change
of political scene, i.e. the disintegration of the Soviet Union, was the main
cause of westernization in Ukraine, the main vehicles being economy, culture
and the mass media.
Many Soviet
citizens have always craved for items of Western material culture – probably
due to the well-known ‘forbidden fruit’ effect. This craving plus the fall of
the communist idols and the devaluation of the communist-nurtured morality have
facilitated the invasion of Western (mainly American) mass culture supported by
the technological and financial superiority of the transnational corporations.
The drive
for learning English is great, but this is not where English words mainly come
from. The greatest number of English borrowings is in the spheres of business
and finance, and computer technology. The media also play an important role.
The westernization of the Ukrainian society is effected directly by contacts
with predominantly American culture Mass culture drains talent from high
culture, and this is where danger lies for Ukraine and other post-communist
nations. As a result, a flood of borrowings from English is inundating the
speech of users of Russian as well as Ukrainian.
Evidence
from lexicographic sources suggests that since the beginning of ‘perestroika’,
the number
of the most recently borrowed words is
764, and 321 (42%) of them are borrowings from English.
These
numbers produce a really awesome impression. No wonder it alarmed the Russian
parliamentarians to such a degree that protective legislation was introduced.
Cultural
contacts are contributing significantly to changes in discursive practices.
Imported words undergo the process of adaptation and many of them have served
as the basis for new jargon. There are noticeable changes in the language of
the press. Both ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ newspapers display a wider stylistic
range of borrowings from English along with free use of formerly taboo and
slang words and expressions.
The data obtained in this research allow us to claim that although
‘economic determinism’ has been scoffed at, it was the economic, political and
cultural changes that caused the words relating to old concepts and events to
drop out of active use and new words, among them borrowed ones, to appear.