La longue guerre à propos de la langue ukrainienne
As Americans have been learning in recent weeks, Russia sometimes has its own way of describing events—like when Vladimir Putin claimed on March 4, despite the presence of Russian troops on the ground, that he hadn’t invaded the Crimean region of east Ukraine. Then there’s the narrative about what is spoken in that invaded country: namely, the Ukrainian language.
A couple of obscure Russian imperial statements on Ukrainian have recently become popular on Russian nationalist blogs and Reddit pages. One comes from the 1863 Valuev Circular, a decree suspending the publication of many religious and educational texts in Ukrainian, or as the Russians called it, Little Russian: “a separate Little Russian language has never existed, does not exist and cannot exist.” The other is a quote attributed to Czar Nicholas II: “There is no Ukrainian language, just illiterate peasants speaking Little Russian.”
The claim that Ukrainian isn’t a language has been one of the drumbeats of the Russian-Ukrainian relationship for centuries. It’s true that the distinction between a language and a dialect is notoriously slippery, often more about politics than mutual intelligibility or shared vocabulary. As Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich famously quoted, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” But according to linguists outside of Russia, Ukrainian and Russian are two distinct, if closely related, languages. The attacks on the status of Ukrainian, in that light, offer a window onto a side of the conflict that can be hard for outsiders to grasp: the persistent ways that Russia has taken advantage of a long and complicated cultural relationship to enforce its claim to power.
In the West, it’s generally agreed that Ukrainian and Russian are separate languages, with 38 percent of their lexicon differing. (That’s slightly more than Spanish and Italian, which differ by 33 percent.) It’s also generally agreed that the three Eastern Slavic languages—Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian—split off from Old East Slavic about a thousand years ago.