Ukrainians need English, not Russian

Ukrainians need English, not Russian
Mar 02 2006, 00:22

Ukraine today faces the threat of Russian becoming its official second
language. Although the issue is overshadowed in domestic media by
well-merited concern over poverty and corruption, and foreign
neo-liberal commentators ignore cultural issues because they think them
irrelevant, language use in Ukraine shouldn't be overlooked: it's
related to political orientation.

At a time when the educated in every country in the world, including
China and Russia, are learning English as a second language, a small
group of Ukraine's neo-Soviet Russophile politicians threaten to
isolate the country with their Russian-language legislation. If
enacted the policy would recognize Russian as a second official
language, throwing Ukraine back culturally 100 years.

Scholars and intellectuals will learn whatever language they want
whenever they want . But most citizens have better things to do than
learn languages. If Russian becomes the "second language" it will
mean that the average Ukrainian who wants direct contact with the rest
of the world will have to learn a third language.

Continued use of Russian for business and in the public sphere would
also send the message that "capitalism and modernity speak
Russian." It would reinforce the notion that Ukrainian is only
suitable for domestic use.

Russian politicians with neo-imperial ambitions and their Russophile
allies in Ukraine consciously obfuscate between Ukraine's Russians
and Ukraine's Russian speakers in an absurd attempt to prove
"anti-Russian discrimination." Anyone with elementary knowledge of
either everyday life or the academic literature realizes such claims
are nonsense and demagogy. The legacy of over 200 years of Russian rule
still lingers 15 years after independence as public life, business and
the media are still largely Russian-speaking outside Ukraine's three
westernmost provinces. At the beginning of this century, in a country
where 20 percent of the population were Russian-speaking Russians, 33
percent were Russian-speaking Ukrainians and 47 percents were
Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians; 10 percent of Ukraine's annual published
book titles, 12 percent of its magazines, 18 percent of its television
programs and 35 percent of its newspapers were in Ukrainian.

Alhough since the spring of 2004 national Ukrainian radio and
television broadcasters had to use Ukrainian, almost all of them have
continued to use Russian. Much more than the legally permissible 50
percent of television programming is in Russian. The head of the
National Television and Radio Council, Vitaliy Shevchenko, told Radio
Free Europe that "Ukraine is becoming a unique country in Europe
because it is losing its own language, which is being squeezed out by
the official language of another country."

The government does not enforce its current language legislation.
According to law, all government employees must speak Ukrainian, but
most do not and continue to be paid nonetheless. Foreign corporations
are largely left alone: McDonald's does use Ukrainian on its menus.
Baskin-Robbins does not.

As of 2004, many teachers still used Russian in
"Ukrainian-language" schools, some of which also had separate
Russian-language classes. Parents picking up their children from
"Ukrainian-language" day-cares hear them singing Russian songs.

The Russophile-dominated parliament has refused to follow the lead of
the Russian government and abolish taxation on domestic publications,
thus keeping Russian-language products in Ukraine cheaper than
Ukrainian - or English-language - products.

The fact that Ukrainian speakers buy fewer books and audio/visual
products than Russian speakers because they are poorer also plays a
role, as does the fact that there is no Ukrainian low-brow urban mass
culture. Perhaps Ukraine's business moguls and tycoons could finance
one. But they do not seem to have tried. Ukrainian writers, producers
and scholars, meanwhile, must accept the reality that modern mass
culture does not consist only of "the classics" and that if
Ukrainian is to win the market competition with Russian, trash must be
written, filmed and recorded in Ukrainian - just like it is in
Russian, English or French. The yellow press in all languages sells in
millions of copies while the quality press sells only tens of
thousands.

Ownership is also an important issue. As much as 80 percent of
Ukraine's media is owned either by Russians or Russophile Ukrainian
citizens. 15 years after independence, however, no one really knows who
owns Ukraine's media. In 2006 the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, funded by
George Soros' Renaissance Foundation, was able to reveal partial
information about 10 stations.

Mass-circulation Russian-language dailies like Bulvar, Kievskie
Vedomosti and Fakty i Kommentarii are not merely sympathetic to
Russophile politicians. They regularly belittle and ridicule things
Ukrainian, and highlight Russian rather than Ukrainian pop stars,
movies and television programs. Ukrainian-language anti-Russian opinion
is limited to low-run fringe publications.

Russian domination of the public sphere, however, does not promote
political loyalty to Russia. What it does do is promote Russophile
orientations. This reinforces the old imperial Russian tie and impedes
the creation of new ties with the rest of the world - which speaks
English.

Logically, there is no necessary correlation between language use and
loyalties. Scots, Irish, Indians, Americans, Australians, and
Canadians, have all expressed their nationalisms in English. Corsicans
and Bretons have used French, and Latin Americans have used Spanish.
Former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and Ukraine's Communist Party
leaders speak Ukrainian when they must, using it as a medium for
neo-imperial and neo-Soviet ideas.

On the other hand, no one can ignore that few of Ukraine's Russian
speakers support political reincorporation into Russia and almost none
have emigrated there since 1991. Ukrainian Russian speakers can be as
pro-EU as Ukrainian speakers, Russian-speaking Ukrainians can be
Ukrainian patriots, and Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian political
leaders see themselves more as representing a territorial region than a
Russian-speaking population. Russian-speaking Kyiv voted overwhelmingly
for Viktor Yushchenko in the 2004 presidential elections and Russian
speakers were as critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin's gas
price-rise policy as were Ukrainian speakers.

Because of tsarist and Soviet politics, however, Russian never became a
medium for Ukrainian national ideas and today Russian is rarely used to
publicly promote Ukrainian national ideas or integration with the EU.
For this reason it is unlikely that Ukraine could become an Eastern
European Ireland.

Consequently, to the degree that the correlation between
Russian-language use and pro-Russian political orientations remains
high, Russian-language use in business and the public sphere will
return Ukraine to its pre-1991 status: a second-rate medium suitable
only for folk culture and marketplace bartering.

Fostering public Russian-language use, in short, impedes Ukraine's
integration with the EU and the world. Teaching Russian as a second
language in Ukraine's schools will isolate it from the rest of the
world. Teaching English would not.



Stephen Velychenko is a Resident Fellow at the Centre for European,
Russian, and Eurasian Studies and Chair of Ukrainian Studies, Munk
Center, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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