[size="2"] 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.
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