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The Position of the Ukrainian Language in Ukraine

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The Position of the Ukrainian Language in Ukraine The Position of the Ukrainian Language in Ukraine Phd Thesis submitted August 1998 School of Slavonic and East European Studies Jennifer Elizabeth Pickurel Taylor ProQuest Number: 10016058 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10016058 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 The Position of Ukrainian Language in Ukraine Acknowledgements 2 Synopsis 3 Chapter One; Language Planning and State Languages 4 Chapter Two: Language Planning in Ukraine 38 Chapter Three: Languages and State-building in Ukraine 77 Chapter Four: Media in Ukraine 115 152 Supplement Chapter Five: Education in Ukraine 160 Chapter Six: Beyond politics: Internal Problems of the 190 Ukrainian Language Conclusions: 239 Bibliography: 251 Acknowledgements: I would like to thank first of all my supervisor Jim Dingley for his support, help and encouragement, regardless - not to mention his unparalleled expertise on all matters Ukrainian. I would also like to thank my wonderful husband, my parents, both sets, and Cara, and John, for their support and encouragement. I have also greatly benefited from the support of a lot of super friends both in London and at home in Virginia, especially Emily, Rob and Beate. In Ukraine, a number of very talented and knowledgeable people contributed their expertise and advice, without whom the gathering of much of this material would have been nearly impossible. I am very grateful to Professor Svitlana and Oleksandra Ermolenko, Sergeant First Class Max Duke, Olena, Serhiy and Yaroslav Bekh, Professor O. Taranenko, and Olga Ivashchenko. I would also like to thank Dr Ali Granmayeh, Dr Peter Duncan and Dr Robert Service for their willingness to discuss the subject of my PhD with great patience. I must also thank Taras Kuzio for offering an excellent alternative viewpoint in the form of his book. A note about transcription: There are a number of acceptable means of transcribing or transliterating Ukrainian words into Latin letters, each with certain problems. The system used is generally the British Library system with a few modifications: to distinguish the jotated [i] from the non-jotated [i], a ‘y ’ is used to represent the jot (as in Ukrayina), and a y also appears where there is an ‘i kratkoe. Otherwise, the soft vowels are spelled with an Ï before the vowel letter, as in /de/8. Soft consonants are designated with an apostrophe, and original apostrophes are preserved. Additionally, the names of state organisations and academic bodies have been translated for clarity. Thus, the Akademiia Nauk is referred to as the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the Instytut Movoznavstva imeni O O Potebni is referred to as the O O Potebnia Institute of Language Studies. The transliterated version of Ukrainian which appears was chosen in place of Cyrillic to facilitate easier reading for those unfamiliar with Ukrainian, or the Ukrainian alphabet. The Position of Ukrainian Language in Ukraine Jennifer Pickurel Taylor, PhD Thesis Before one even begins to discuss language in Ukraine, one basic premise must be understood: there are no easy ansv^ers. One may succeed best in identifying relevant, objective questions instead. This research offers few solutions or predictions concerning the competition between Ukrainian and Russian languages in Ukraine, and the national consciousness of Ukrainians with relation to their language and world view. At this stage in Ukraine’s development, it is more useful to bring all the disparate trends of government language planning policy, social trends and politics into one cohesive body of work for analysis. 5ocio-linguistic5 provides an appropriate and objective methodological framework to discuss both the internal linguistic problems of the language and external social and political problems. This means the analytical viewpoints generally adopted by political science or theoretical linguistics may feature, but are not handled in any depth. Rather, the inter-relationship of language and society is examined in detail using a variety of reference points. These include education in Ukraine, Ukrainian media and the internal and external attempts to regulate the use and content of Ukrainian language. This research is unique in that most of the material here presented has not appeared together in any language, nor separately in English. Furthermore, the approach is a departure from traditional methods of either linguistic or historical study, and does not reflect the political science framework adopted by contemporary scholars. It is thus an attempt to collect subjective diagnostic and corrective work on the language situation in Ukraine, to combine this research with statistical data and to present an objective analysis of the status of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine and its prospects for the future. Chapter 1: Language Planning and State Languages introduction: Contemporary Ukraine is a heterogeneous language community. Its population uses several different languages which reflect ethnic, regional or political loyalties, or all three. Current government policy states that Ukrainian is the sole official language of Ukraine, but after centuries of foreign rule, not everyone speaks enough Ukrainian to use that language in every situation. In order to ensure the undisputed supremacy of Ukrainian language within the boundaries of the Ukrainian state, measures are in force to promote its usage and to discontinue the usage of competing languages in official situations. This policy and its processes can be referred to as language planning. This work intends to investigate the status and usage of Ukrainian language in Ukraine, and evaluate the effectiveness of proposed and already enacted means of improving the perception of Ukrainian and its feasibility for usage in every function necessary in daily life. In Ukraine, despite statistics and studies which show the that number of speakers of Ukrainian has increased, and other indicators of linguistic stability or improvement, many if not most native speakers remain pessimistic, convinced of the impending demise of their mother tongue. Is the situation as bad as one is led to believe? Is Ukraine totally Russified, the Ukrainian language relegated to archaic textbooks and the conversation of ageing dissidents? Is there a political consequence of the demise of Ukrainian that means regional identities will become separatist tendencies, creating a domino effect that brings down the entire country? As the numbers will show, those quick to leap to the defence of political demands made by ethnic Russians, or to support Ukrainians themselves who believe their language is on the verge of extinction, may in fact wish to rethink their position. Though the position of Ukrainian language in Ukraine is far from established as comfortably as English in Britain or French in France, with Ukrainian independence a political fact and the continued presence of international support, one can hardly describe the situation as critical, grim or precarious. As Magocsi asserts. Urbanization, moreover, did not lead, as many Soviet and Western social scientists predicted, to national assimilation. It turned out that the multicultural urban environment was more likely to produce a sharpening than a lessening of ethnocultural awareness. Thus in the same period when Soviet Ukraine’s population grew more urban, the number of persons claiming Ukrainian as their mother tongue continued to increase, from 30 million in 1959 to 37.4 million in 1989. It is also true that among persons who declared Ukrainian to be their nationality, there was a slight decrease in the percentage who claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue (from 94 to 88 percent between 1959 and 1989). But such trends did not necessarily mean that either the Ukrainian language or he Ukrainian identity was seriously threatened, as the dire predictions of dissident writers and Ukrainian commentators in the West were suggesting.^ Magocsl’s assertion that the Ukrainian nation remains unassimilated and Ukrainian-speaking is demonstrated in recent population statistics and borne out by research. The important question addressed by this work is not, therefore, exactly how bad the situation is. One must ask instead, where are the language planning successes, how do they affect Ukrainian society, and what remains to be done? The approach taken is therefore a sociolinguistic one, in as much that this research examines language behaviour and attitudes as an indicator and a reflection of social behaviour in general. Changes in one cause or reflect changes in the other, and mark Ukraine’s progress towards a more established national identity on the world stage. While ^ Magocsi, (1996), p. 664. one cannot discuss language or society without some mention of linguistics or politics, the emphasis in this research is on the connections between these areas and state-building, all within the framework of language planning. For this reason, neither issues pertaining to political science nor theoretical
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