NEWSWATCH: “New Fighting in Ukraine’s Language War. If Kyiv draws new battle lines in the country’s language war, Moscow is ready to restart its side of this conflict.” – Carnegie Europe/ Thomas de Waal

May 29, 2017 JRL Russia List JRL NewsBlog, Russian Language, Ukraine, Russo-Ukrainian War

“… Ukraine’s language wars are restarting. A bill requiring 75 percent of national television broadcasts to be in Ukrainian has just been passed by the Rada. It follows a very unpopular move by … Poroshenko to ban Russian-language social media websites …. Next up … is draft legislation that seeks to ensure ‘the functioning and use of Ukrainian as a state language in all spheres of public life in the whole territory of Ukraine.’ * * * … Currently, many Ukrainian teachers and professors switch back and forth from Ukrainian to Russian, depending on the language preferences of their students or the requests of parents. It is an open secret in Kyiv that the city has very few formal Russian-language schools but many classes are conducted in Russian when parents ask for it informally. … informal bilingualism, where Ukrainian remains the formal language of the state but Russian gets used on an ad hoc basis, has facilitated a clear trend whereby Ukrainian is becoming more and more the default language of the country. …”