A Tense and Shifting Balance: Bilingualism and Education in Ukraine

Abstract

Language policy is a divisive issue in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian and Russian languages coexist in a tenuous balance. Many people see the choice between Russian and Ukrainian as symbolic of two polar political and cultural allegiances: with Russia, or with Europe and the West. Promotion of Ukrainian is meant to counteract its historical subjugation to Russian. At the same time, there is state support for minority languages and cultures, including Russian, to help develop a Ukrainian civic identity not restricted to Ukrainian ethnicity. Legislation designates Ukrainian as the sole state language while also supporting education in Russian and other languages, including Romanian, Hungarian, and Crimean Tatar. The previously low status of Ukrainian has risen greatly since the disintegration of the USSR, and this language is much more widely used than before in education, government, and public life in general. However, Russian continues to dominate in many spheres as it did during the Soviet era. Many people feel that the survival of Ukrainian is still threatened by Russian, and that the recent gains of Ukrainian in status and spheres of use are tenuous. In 2008, struggles over language policies persist and the implementation of existing policies continues to be uneven.

Russian in post-Soviet countries

“…Ukrainian is now the language of the government, law, and official documentation, it is also the main language of secondary and higher education. In the year 2005/2006, 78% of Ukraine's secondary school students attended Ukrainian-language schools (this number does not include Crimea) (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008). Outside of the Russian-language schools, Russian is now taught alongside other foreign languages, such as English or German, and selected works of Russian literature are incorporated in Ukrainian translation into the course on world literature.…”

“…Eventually Crimea declared itself the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and adopted its own language and education policies. At present, more than 76% of the population of Crimea sees Russian as its native language and 93% of the children are educated in Russian-language schools (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008).…”

“…Both Russians and russophone Ukrainians living in these territories use Russian on a daily basis, with Russian still prevailing in commerce, industry, media, pop-culture, literature, and sports (Arel 2002;Bilaniuk 2005;Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008;Pavlenko 2006). The dominant factor in this perseverance of Russian is the presence of a large contingent of russophone Ukrainians.…”

“…Even within the confines of a Ukrainiandominated educational system, students switch to Russian during breaks, meetings, and informal events (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008;Kopylenko 2006). A survey conducted in 2005 in Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University revealed that among 199 respondents who identified themselves as Ukrainian, 40% self-identified as russophones, and another 26% as using both languages or a mix of the two (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008). At the same time the prestige of Ukrainian has undoubtedly grown in the past fifteen years and so have the levels of Ukrainian-language competence among Russians and russophone Ukrainians.…”

“…The reason for that is that Georgian authorities are much more likely to understand documents in Russian than in Armenian or Azerbaijanian, while members of the local communities may be more fluent in Russian as a second language than in Georgian (Bezirganova 2006a;Kock Kobaidze 2001;Wheatley 2006). Kock Kobaidze's (2001) study of Armenian students studying in Russian and Armenian schools in Georgia reveals the same disparity between the mother tongue reflective of one's ethnicity (Armenian) and the language learned in childhood and used in everyday communication (Russian) identified by Brown (2005) in Belarus and by Bilaniuk and Melnyk (2008) in Ukraine. Only 36% of Armenians studying in Russian schools in Georgia reported Armenian as their mother tongue and even they displayed various degrees of proficiency in the language.…”