Ukraine: How a Controversial New Language Law Could Help Protect Minorities and Unite the Country

‘The language matters!’: Activists demonstrate in Kiev, April 2019 to demand the passage of a new language law. EPA-EFE/Sergey Dolzhenko


Ukraine is celebrating 28 years of independence – but since 1991 the country has struggled to find the right policies and practices to protect and promote Ukrainian, the state language. It has also tried to prioritise policies of inclusion for ethnic and linguistic minorities while supporting the languages and cultures of Ukraine’s indigenous peoples. A new law passed in July 2019, if successfully implemented, may finally help strike the balance.

Ukrainian is currently is the eighth most spoken language in Europe with more than 33m speakers. Along with Belarusian and Russian, with which it shares Cyrillic script, it is an East Slavic language. Despite having some similarities with Russian, it is a separate language. Russian is widely spoken in Ukraine with small concentrations of Romanian and Hungarian speakers in the west. Ukraine’s indigenous languages (Crimean Tatar, Karaim and Krimchak) are recognised by UNESCO as endangered languages.

Over the past three decades, Ukrainian politicians have too often, in my opinion, exploited the issue of language policy – especially the question of giving Russian official status in the country – as a way of mobilising their respective bases, at the expense of national solidarity and cohesion.

This is despite the fact that Ukrainians routinely rank the issue of language very low on a list of the country’s problems. In 2018, only 2.4% of Ukrainians viewed the status of the Russian language as the most important problem in the country. Despite this, the former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, made the support of the Ukrainian language a key element of his re-election campaign. But it didn’t give his campaign any discernible lift and he was ousted at the April 2019 election by comedian Volodymyr Zelensky.

Russian gets weaponised

In 2014, the Kremlin used the issue to justify its military aggression against Ukraine. Vladimir Putin repeatedly claimed that Ukraine’s post-Maidan government was targeting Russian-speakers in the country. Given that the government was led by native Russian-speakers, such as Oleksandr Turchynov and Petro Poroshenko, this was an absurd argument. But nonetheless, some western observers appeared to accept it.

The law, On the Provision of the Functioning of Ukrainian as the State Language, passed in April and took force on July 16. Unsurprisingly, it was met with a fierce reaction from the Kremlin, which called for the United Nations Security Council to debate the issue.

Russian influence: Vladimir Putin with members of the pro-Kremlin biker gang Night Wolves in Sevastopol, Crimea, August 2019. EPA-EFE/Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/Kremlin


But beyond the political bluster, what are the actual features of this law and does it have the potential to allow effective functioning of Ukrainian and other languages and, at the same time, bring the country together?

Securing official status

The law affirms Ukrainian as the main language of inter-ethnic communication – a role most recently played by Russian and by German and Polish in earlier historical periods. It also ensures that information and services are available in Ukrainian – something that was not previously the case in the majority of cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, where Russian dominates in all spheres of public life. But the law also allows official interactions in languages that are “acceptable to both sides”, and it doesn’t completely rule out the use of Russian.

Drafts of the law in development were criticised for forcing media (including academic publications) to publish equal numbers in Ukrainian and other languages. It was argued that this makes the existence of such newspapers like the Kyiv Post – the most famous Ukrainian newspaper in English – very problematic. As a response to this criticism, the law was changed to allow publication in English and “other official languages of the European Union”. So, while supporting multilingualism, the law clearly rules out Russian as the language of inter-ethnic communication.

But the law’s requirements to ensure that all theatrical performances and 90% of films are in Ukrainian, with an undefined exception for “artistic necessity”, seem both unproductive and excessive.

Supporting language minorities

If successful, the law will go a long way towards protecting Ukraine’s indigenous languages. Media outlets are obliged to produce a certain percentage of their content in the indigenous language, while all higher educational institutions must have the capacity to teach indigenous languages to all students who express a desire for it.

Protesters demonstrate against the disappearance of Crimean Tatar activists. Tatars are one of Ukraine’s oppressed minority groups, October 2016. EPA/Roman Pilipey


The law also stipulates that language courses must be available in the languages of Ukraine’s ethnic minorities and, for the first time in Ukraine’s history, Ukrainian sign language is given protection and support. This empowerment has been somewhat overlooked in the recent comments on the law that mostly focused on the rights of Russian-speakers.

But Ukraine’s parliament has still to pass additional legislation on the rights of the indigenous people and minorities of Ukraine, which is required under the terms of the language law. This should provide additional mechanisms to protect the rights of Russian-speakers and other minorities. The newly-created party, Servant of the People, recently won power and has declared that it will “deal with this issue”.

As we’ve heard, despite the outside world’s obsession with language as one of the critical issues in Ukraine, only a small minority of people see it as a high-priority problem. The 2018 survey referred to above also showed people are far more worried about the ongoing military conflict and the effect it is having on living standards and the economy.

What’s clear, though, is that these problems won’t be solved without national cohesion. So, whether or not Ukrainians themselves think it important, the right formula for establishing Ukrainian as the official state language, as well as supporting and protecting indigenous and minority languages, will be key to helping the embattled country pull together.

IVAB KOZACHENKO is a Postdoctoral research associate, University of Cambridge.


There’s a Dark Political History to Language That Strips People of Their Dignity

Residents of Baltimore, Maryland, seen here, were the object of dehumanizing language from President Trump.  REUTERS/Stephanie Keith


Dehumanizing language often precedes genocide.




On July 27, President Trump tweeted that Baltimore was a “"disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and “No human being would want to live there.”



President Donald Trump.  AP/Carolyn Kaster

President Donald Trump. AP/Carolyn Kaster

Insults and conflict






Screen Shot 2019-08-10 at 6.26.04 PM.png

Conflict and Escalation







WILLIAM A. DONOHUE is a distinguished Professor of Communication at Michigan State University.


PERU: Saving an Ancient Language Through Pop Music

Renata Flores is a 16-year-old singer from Peru who is using her voice to save an ancient Incan language. Though Quechua is the second-most spoken language in Peru, native speakers have suffered from discrimination and social stigma for generations, and today, many young people aren’t learning the language at all. But with her powerful vocals to covers of pop songs by Michael Jackson and Alicia Keys in her native tongue, Flores is sparking a renewed celebration of Quechuan language and culture.

Renaissance on the Bayou: The Revival of a Lost Language

Members of the Chitimacha language team (from left to right) Sam Boutte, Kim Walden and Rachel Vilcan use the new language software for the first time.&nbsp;Author provided


In the summer of 1930, at the dawn of the Great Depression, a 21-year-old linguist named Morris Swadesh set out for Louisiana to record the area’s Native American languages, which were disappearing rapidly.

Morris and his peers were in a race against time to document them, and in the small town of Charenton on the Bayou Teche, he encountered Benjamin Paul and Delphine Ducloux, members of a small tribe called Chitimacha – and the last two speakers of their language.

But today, if you visited the Chitimacha reservation, you’d never know that their language went unspoken for half a century.

Over the past several decades, many Native American tribes have participated in what has become a robust language revitalization movement. As their populations of fluent speakers dwindle and age, tribes want to ensure that their heritage languages are passed on to the next generation – before it’s too late.

But because the Chitimacha tribe had no living speakers for a number of decades, it made the challenge that much greater. In the end, the story of the language’s decline, loss and rebirth is a remarkable example of cultural survival.

Why document a language?

Unlike some other cultural legacies, languages leave no trace in the archaeological record. There’s often no trace in the written record, either.

Only a small portion of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages are well-documented in places like dictionaries and grammar books. Those that are least well-documented are the most endangered.

Many dead or dying languages contain exotic features of verbal and written communication. Chitimacha, for example, doesn’t use a word “be” in phrases like “she is reading.” Instead, speakers must use a verb of position, such as “she sits reading” or “she stands reading.” These are things that challenge linguists’ understanding of how language works.

By working with Ben and Delphine, Morris was trying to capture a small piece of that linguistic diversity before it vanished.

One day, with Morris sitting on Ben’s porch dutifully scribbling down his every word in a composition notebook, Ben finished a story (a riveting tale of how the Chitimacha first acquired fire by stealing it from a mythical old blind man in the west). He then went on to tell Morris:

There were very many stories about the west. I believe I am doing well. I have not forgotten everything yet. When I die, you will not hear that sort of thing again. I am the only one here who knows the stories.

Ben passed away three years later, and Delphine not long thereafter. After their deaths, it seemed the Chitimacha language was doomed to silence.

Why do languages die?

How does a language come to have only two speakers? Why have so many Native American languages become endangered? The causes are manifold, but there are two main ones: sharp reductions in the population of the community that speaks the language, and interruptions in the traditional means of transferring the language from one generation to the next.

In the past, the former caused the most damage. Native American peoples were decimated by European diseases and subject to outright warfare.

A portrait of two Chitimacha by French-born painter François Bernard (1870).&nbsp; Wikimedia Commons

A portrait of two Chitimacha by French-born painter François Bernard (1870). Wikimedia Commons

Prior to European contact, the Chitimacha were lords of the bayou, with a territory stretching from Vermillion Bay in the west to present-day New Orleans in the east. They were expert canoe-makers and wielded extensive knowledge of the region’s labyrinthian network of waterways.

But by the time the French arrived in present-day Louisiana in 1699, the tribe’s numbers had dwindled to around 4,000, their communities gutted by European diseases that spread faster than the Europeans themselves.

After a protracted war with the French, they retreated deep into the bayou, where the their reservation at Charenton sits today. The 1910 census recorded just 69 people living there.

Only later did the second cause of language decline occur, when children on the reservation were sent to the infamous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which interrupted the transmission of the language to the next generation.

Ben and Delphine, born in the latter half of the 1800s, were part of the last generation to learn the language at home. Eventually their parents and many of their peers passed away, leaving them as the last two speakers of the language.

Renaissance on the bayou

Ben probably never imagined that the efforts of him and Delphine would spark the tribe’s linguistic renaissance, awakening their language from 60 years of silence.

Delphine Ducloux was one of the two last speakers of the Chitimacha language, prior to its revival.&nbsp; State Library of Louisiana

Delphine Ducloux was one of the two last speakers of the Chitimacha language, prior to its revival. State Library of Louisiana

In the early 1990s, cultural director for the tribe Kim Walden received a call from the American Philosophical Society Library informing her that they had all of Morris’ notebooks, and even his drafts for a grammar manual and dictionary, which totaled hundreds of pages in all. Thus began the herculean effort to revive the language.

The tribe put together a small-but-dedicated team of language experts, who set out to learn their language as quickly as possible. They began to produce storybooks based on Ben and Delphine’s stories, and word lists from the dictionary manuscript.

In 2008, the tribe partnered with the software company Rosetta Stone on a two-year project to create computer software for learning the language, which today every registered tribal member has a copy of. This is where I came in, serving as editor and linguist consultant for the project, a monumental collaborative effort involving thousands of hours of translating, editing, recording and photographing. We’re now hard at work finishing a complete dictionary and learner’s reference grammar for the language.

Today, if you stroll through the reservation’s school, you’ll hear kids speaking Chitimacha in language classes, or using it with their friends in the hall. At home they practice with the Chitimacha version of Rosetta Stone, and this past year the tribe even launched a preschool immersion program.

The kids even make up slang that baffles adult ears, a sure sign that the language is doing well – and hopefully will continue to thrive, into the next generation and beyond.

Author Danny Hieber presents the story of the Chitimacha language at the University of California’s Grad Slam competition.

DANIEL W. HIEBER is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the University of California in Santa Barbara.


How the Loss of Native American Languages Affects our Understanding of the Natural World

Dance is a unique way of passing on cultural stories to a younger generation.&nbsp; Aaron Hawkins/ ,&nbsp; CC BY-ND

Dance is a unique way of passing on cultural stories to a younger generation. Aaron Hawkins/Flickr.comCC BY-ND




Environmental knowledge


The shell necklace of Queen Liliʻuokalani.&nbsp; David Eickhoff/ ,&nbsp; CC BY

The shell necklace of Queen Liliʻuokalani. David Eickhoff/Flickr.comCC BY




A tool for doctors





Blackfeet Word of the Day. Blackfeet History, Language and Environmental Knowledge.

Saving vanishing languages







ROSALYN R. LAPIER is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at The University of Montana.


This Man Speaks 32 Different Languages

Ioannis Ikonomou works for the European Commission as a translator. It's a prestigious position, and yet it still sells him short. You see, Ioannis speaks 32 living languages. He belongs to a very small and special group of people called hyperpolyglots who have the extraordinary ability to attain fluency in many different tongues. According to Ioannis, there's no special trick or easy way to become a hyperpolyglot, but the best way to start is to boldly put yourself out there and speak.

The Origins of Pama-Nyungan, Australia’s Largest Family of Aboriginal Languages









Tracing Pama-Nyungan


Different related words for ‘fire’ in certain Pama-Nyungan languages. Green dots show languages with a word for ‘fire’ related to *warlu; white has *puri; red has *wiyn; blue has *maka, and purple *karla.&nbsp;Chirila files ( and google earth for base image.







What languages tell us









This article was originally published on The Conversation.




Claire Bowern is Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. Her 2004 PhD is from Harvard University and examined the historical morphology of complex verb constructions in a family of non-Pama-Nyungan (Australian) languages. Her research focuses on the Indigenous languages of Australia, and is concerned with language documentation/description and prehistory.