Language in Times of Transition: an Introduction

Language in times of transition: an introduction VOLODYMYR KULYK Language processes in contemporary Ukraine deserve scholarly attention for several reasons. First, the very transition from Soviet to post-Soviet state and society facilitates contestation and change of statuses and func- tions of di¤erent language varieties, first and foremost the new ‘‘national’’ language, Ukrainian, and the former ‘‘imperial’’ one, Russian. Rather than an outright reversal of the two varieties’ roles as High and Low languages in Ukrainian society, the two decades of independence have been characterized by a contradictory mixture of change and continuity, with di¤erent situations in di¤erent regions and social domains. Second, both post-Soviet change and Soviet ambivalence of policies and discourses have led to a considerable mismatch between language beliefs and practices. That is, people do not always prefer to speak those varieties which they value and which they would like to see more widely used by other people and supported by the state, in particular (Standard) Ukrainian. Adding to this mismatch is a lack of correspondence between the linguistic and the ethnic identification of many Ukrainian citizens, which para- doxically coexists with a widespread belief in the desirability and even naturalness of such correspondence. The ambiguous structure of ethno- linguistic identities and a lack of clearly defined language groups clearly distinguishes Ukraine from most European countries whose nation-state model it has sought to implement, and therefore contributes to the incon- sistent and conflict-ridden nature of this implementation. Third, while the relationship between Ukrainian and Russian primarily determines the nationwide dynamics of language practices and beliefs, other languages come into play in some parts of the country. This pertains most notably to Hungarian, Romanian, and Crimean Tatar, which are spoken and/or identified with by a considerable share of the population in the southwestern regions of Zakarpattia and Bukovyna and the Crimean peninsula in the south, respectively. Last but not least, contradictory dynamics of language statuses are accompanied by a complex process of reassess- ment and modification of their corpuses. This process has most vividly 0165–2516/10/0201–0001 Int’l. J. Soc. Lang. 201 (2010), pp. 1–4 6 Walter de Gruyter DOI 10.1515/IJSL.2010.001 Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 4/11/15 11:28 AM 2 V. Kulyk manifested itself with regard to Ukrainian, as its elevation to the status of the sole o‰cial language of the new independent state is widely believed to require purification and de-Russification of its orthography, dictio- naries, stylistic norms, and other aspects. The articles in the present volume deal with all these issues. Written by anthropologists, linguists, and political scientists from the United States, Sweden, Poland, and Ukraine itself, the articles analyze processes in various regions and social domains, paying attention to both practices of language use and beliefs about nature and use of language(s) that reflect and influence these practices. Although not all contributors call such beliefs language ideologies, the term primarily used in anthropology, they share the perception originating from this discipline, of these beliefs as context- specific, dynamic, contested, and at the same time, not always explicitly manifested or even consciously held. Using a broad range of methods, from surveys to in-depth interviews to participant observation of every- day language use to discourse analysis of political documents and media products, the authors seek to register and possibly explain declarations and omissions, connections and contradictions, general patterns and par- ticularities. One aspect of language beliefs/ideologies that most authors pay attention to is what patterns of behavior in any given context are considered the norm, and thus taken for granted. The first three articles present di¤erent regional patterns of language interaction between members of various groups and their perceptions of this interaction. Margrethe Søvik analyzes reported practices and beliefs of young residents of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which is lo- cated in the eastern part of the country, close to the Russian border. She amply demonstrates that the dominance of the Russian language in the city is perceived as the norm, notwithstanding the sole o‰cial status of Ukrainian and its support by many young respondents as their ‘‘native’’ and/or ‘‘national’’ language. Given that social change is usually associ- ated with younger generations, the spread of such perception among the youth indicates that, at least in that part of the country, continuity is likely to prevail. In contrast, Anna Wylegała’s study of identification patterns of young members of the Russian-speaking intelligentsia in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv shows a radical change of perceived norm. For this group, the norm has come to include the view of Russian speakers’ accommodation toward Ukrainian as the only viable mode of language behavior in that city, and accordingly, of private communica- tion as the only appropriate domain for the use of Russian. While these texts reveal two rather stable, if radically di¤erent from each other, models of interaction between the country’s two main languages which are largely determined by the relative strengths of language groups (Russian Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 4/11/15 11:28 AM Language in times of transition 3 speakers predominate in Kharkiv, but are a clear minority in Lviv), the third article focuses on context-specific beliefs and patterns of behavior and shifts attention to other languages/varieties. Jennifer Dickinson demonstrates that in the multilingual southwestern region of Zakarpattia (Transcarpathia), di¤erent ideologies prescribing di¤erent ways of behavior are contextually applied to guide one’s choice of language variety and the evaluation of the choice by one’s communicative partners. In that region, Standard Ukrainian competes for popular recognition and use not only with Russian and languages of ethnic minorities and their transbor- der kin states (Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia), but also with local di- alects of Ukrainian and a non-standard Rusyn variety, whose supporters seek to establish it as a separate Slavic language. The next two articles deal with the media, which has lately come to be recognized by scholars as one of the most important domains for the maintenance and transformation of language beliefs and patterns of usage. Both texts primarily pay attention to the choice between, and combination of, Ukrainian and Russian, as well as language ideologies that guide it. My own text covers media usage in a variety of genres in the print and broadcast media and juxtaposes it with presentation of language behavior by other social actors, most notably in the news. While in the latter Ukrainian is usually presented as the national language of the country, the former employs various patterns of combination of the two languages revealing the perception that both of them are equally acceptable, or normal (according to the concept of normality, which distinguishes it from normativity). Laada Bilaniuk focuses on television talk shows and game shows and demonstrates how their patterns of combin- ing Ukrainian and Russian in one program establish non-accommodation as a legitimate pattern of language behavior in the country, which, accordingly, gets presented as inherently bilingual. By normalizing such non-accommodating bilingualism, television, in a sense, teaches its viewers to adhere to their ‘‘true’’ identities, with a paradoxical conse- quence of essentializing these into two unilingual poles at the cost of various mixtures that individuals might embrace. The last two articles explore further domains where language beliefs are articulated, contested, and carried on. Stanislav Shumlianskyi analyzes how competing political discourses present di¤erent versions of language grouping in Ukrainian society, which have supposedly less to do with putative members’ identities than with the politicians’ own interest in protecting and supporting particular languages. He argues that political competition and confrontation does not reflect diverging interests of language groups so much as it creates these interests and the very groups. While his analysis focuses on ideologues lesser known among the general Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 4/11/15 11:28 AM 4 V. Kulyk public, Shumlianskyi believes that the stances and statements of major political forces are influenced by discursive patterns produced by those seemingly marginal figures. Galina Yavorska, in the volume’s only text primarily dealing with the corpus, rather than status, studies the manifes- tation of language ideologies in practices of Ukrainian language stan- dardization over the course of the last two centuries. She discerns what she calls cultural models informing the choice on orthographical, lexical, and stylistic levels, and shows that the most influential of them have been those underscoring the particularity of the Ukrainian language, which since the twentieth century has meant first and foremost its distance from Russian. In addition to the authors, the presentation of this volume has been made possible by the e¤ort of some other people to whom I would like to hereby express my

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