Abstract
In Ukraine, promoting the Ukrainian language has been an important part of nation-building after post-Soviet independence. However, different regions of the country question this connection between language, identity, and the nation-state. In western regions, speaking Ukrainian is believed to be essential to legitimizing one’s Ukrainian ethnic identity. In practice, however, there are a variety of ideologies of language related to national identity. To date, little has been done to examine how young people in this region utilize competing discourses of identity at multiple spatial scales in defining their own notions of identity. Drawing upon ethnographic data, I examine how 13- to 15-year-olds interpret language use in relation to ethnic and national identity. Through this research, I aim to show how young people’s everyday engagements with local, national, and global ideologies complicate notions of a coherent, territorially based nation.
Introduction
We were taking the bus back to Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, at the end of a fieldtrip. The day had been spent visiting a historical museum, followed by lunch at a nearby park. A few students asked the teachers whether they could use the bus speaker system to amplify the music they had on their cell phones. The teachers agreed, as long as the songs were “good” and “in Ukrainian.” In short order, these two rules were broken. The music choices began with Ukrainian-language standards, then contemporary Ukrainian rock. One girl, Nina, asked whether she could play one of her songs. One of the teachers asked, “is it good?” to which Nina responded, “it’s in Ukrainian.” The song was a popular hip-hop song, performed in Ukrainian. A few Russian-language hip-hop songs were played, and then an English-language hip-hop/rap song. In the middle of the song, the teachers said “that’s enough!” telling the students to turn the music off and repeating that they wanted something “good.” So, the kids played a few more Russian pop and hip-hop songs. Finally, the teachers complained of the loud volume and they ended the “cell phone jukebox.” The bus radio was finally switched to a Russian-language radio station playing older Russian songs.
Instances such as these highlight how ideologies about language (Schieffelin et al., 1998) are contextually mediated by the local interaction as well as wider national and global environments. In playing their music, these youth quickly moved through multilayered scales—from the Ukrainian-only national ideology to the Ukrainian–Russian bilingual national environment, to the English-dominated global musical arena—in their acts of engaging as members of a wider culture of hip-hop. Although Lviv and much of the western region of Ukraine see language as central to an ethnonational identity—the politicization of ethnic identity for nationalist purposes (Hobsbawm, 1990)—in everyday life, young people engage with language related to national ideologies from various sources, drawing upon them as they move through different spheres of life.
In this article, I suggest that young people’s views about Ukrainian and foreign languages are complex and ambivalent. I draw together literature on the role of language in nation-building processes with recent scholarship on scale by linguistic anthropologists in order to suggest that youth engagement at multiple spatial sites complicates the notion of a coherent national identity. First, I discuss the linkages between national identity, spatialized ideologies of language, and the growing importance of class identities. Then, I demonstrate how young people’s differing class positions are linked to their views of “legitimate” Ukrainian, and how their attitudes are dependent upon the extent to which these young people seek to engage with others beyond their local communities. I conclude by showing how the differences in students’ views of linguistic competency reveal alternative pathways and expectations for Ukrainian-speakers and the Ukrainian nation.
Nation-building and language
Scholars who examine nation-building often focus on how modern states have drawn upon the idea of a shared, unique community that is linked to a specific territory, a shared culture, religion, and language (Smith, 1998). Where a sense of national identity does not exist, states may attempt to create a narrative of the “ever-existing” nation, of which the state is a current manifestation (Hobsbawm, 1990; Hroch, 1990). In either case, the nation is not a natural community, but one this is “imagined” through shared experiences (Anderson, 1991) and the spread of a “standardized” national culture (Gellner, 1983). With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many of the former republics sought to emulate the European idea of “one nation-state, one language,” although some of those living within their borders were of different national identities, and many of their co-nationals lived in other republics (Brubaker, 1996; Szporluk, 1994).
Viewing the experiences of youth and how they come to engage with and become members of a nation involves examining not only their everyday interactions, but also how a variety of ideologies may shape and inform their identities. National identity is not the only identity that is important for young people. As Hall (1997) has shown, identities are multiple and context dependent, and the connections made available through global flows of people, goods, and information (Appadurai, 1996; Sassen, 1998; Tsing, 2005) further lead us to redefine the role of the nation in people’s daily lives.
As sites of social reproduction, schools are often places where social norms and identities are learned (Bourdieu and Passerson, 1977; Collins, 2009, 2012), or challenged (Heller and Martin-Jones, 2001). Research in the former Soviet and Eastern Bloc, for example, has examined how educational reforms were enacted in order to instill a clear national identity in the youngest generation (Mincu, 2009; Wanner, 1995), even if they devalue more local forms of identity in the process (Brown, 2005). Many of these reforms focused on rewriting history textbooks (Popson, 2001; Solonari, 2002; Zorkaia, 2009) and prioritizing the national language (Marshall, 2002; Polese, 2010) in order to dislodge the prevailing Soviet or socialist perspective (Janmaat, 2005; Korostelina, 2010). Youth and local schools, however, can take an agentive role in affirming, rejecting, or challenging these national goals, for example, when they support local (Polese, 2010; Richardson, 2008) or regional perspectives (Rodgers, 2007), or when they temporarily embrace wide-scale social movements (Fournier, 2007). National educational policies, therefore, may encourage students to identify with particular views of Ukrainian identity, but students themselves may find more meaning in other forms of belonging (Richardson, 2008).
Scale and youth identities
Youth may also simultaneously engage with global communities. Geographers have examined the role of scale in studies of childhood. Some have argued that applying scale is problematic because it is difficult to detach the local from the global, as they are often entwined (Ansell, 2009). Following Holloway and Valentine (2000), I propose that the perspective that problematizes the entwined nature of the local and the global limits scale to a binary issue: “Thus, children’s worlds of meaning are at one and the same time global and local, made through ‘local’ cultures which are in part shaped by their interconnections with the wider world” (p. 769). Local interactions remain important to creating, shaping, maintaining, and challenging identities. Global connections, however, can influence local events, such as transnational migration in daily relations (Dickinson, 2007), Afro-Ukrainian hip-hop in local class identities (Helbig, 2014), or defining what a “normal” life looks like on a global scale (Greenberg, 2011; Patico, 2008). An emphasis on scale, therefore, allows us to trace and examine how meaning-making can be responding to both local expecta-tions and global aspirations, at times aligning “glocally” (Meyrowotz, 2005) but perhaps not completely.
Recent work by linguistic anthropologists has also come to this conclusion. As Blommaert (2007) has argued, “human social environments [need] to be seen as polycentric and stratified, where people continuously need to observe ‘norms’ … that are attached to a multitude of centers of authority, local as well as translocal, momentary as well as lasting” (p. 2). A recent issue of Anthropology & Education Quarterly (2012) focused on exploring scale in educational contexts, highlighting the importance of breaking down analyses of temporal and spatial scale as peoples’ everyday practices are invariably linked to “more widely circulating, often institutionally anchored models of the social world” (Wortham, 2012: 129). For example, Collins (2012, 2013) explores how globalization asks us to view social inequality of minority youth at multiple scales. As these scholars show, scale is essential to understanding the experiences of young people, and how they come to define and understand their place in the world.
Scale can be useful in examining how ideologies of language intersect with class among youth. Class differences can influence how children and youth actively shape their social worlds (Holloway and Valentine, 2000) through their own cultural practices (Bucholtz, 2002). In short, youth perform and create multiple “worlds of meaning” through their practices. Youth practices, then, engage with differing spatial scales and timescales that are layered upon each other, at once both synchronic and yet have diachronic repercussions (Blommaert, 2007: 3).
Context and methodology
The data analyzed here comes from research I conducted at two state secondary schools in Lviv in 2006–2007, as well as observations from research trips to Lviv in 2003, 2004, and 2013, altogether 22 months. The schools were located in working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. As class continues to be a difficult concept to define in postsocialist states, I use the term here as a proxy for a nexus of traits, primarily location of residency in the city, parental education and employment, youths’ experiences traveling outside of the Lviv oblast, family experiences traveling internationally, and household consumer goods (i.e. computer, car, remodeled home), when available.
During the main 16-month trip, I conducted ethnographic research 1 among approximately 60 students, during their eighth and ninth grade years. My research included observations of 291 lessons, 37 interviews with students and teachers, and recordings of 13 lessons. I primarily observed lessons on Ukrainian language, Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian history, world history, civics, and chemistry. In breaks between lessons, I also took notes on the different ways in which youth interacted during these adult-free times, and observed their style choices—such as clothing, hair, and makeup use, and music tastes—and friendship groups. Interviews with students were primarily in pairs, but also included semi-structured focus groups where we discussed issues of future aspirations, Ukrainians abroad, and rural and city life. I also spent time with a smaller group of students from both schools, primarily girls, outside of school as they socialized with friends and spent time with their families.
The data presented here come from an analysis of my field note observations, transcribed recordings, and data collected from an in-class survey. Recordings were transcribed with the help of a local native Ukrainian speaker, and were translated and coded by me with input from a Ukrainian linguist. The interviews with youth were analyzed through close reading. My notes from everyday observations at the schools were also coded thematically to uncover details that were not captured during recorded sessions.
The richness of rural speech in everyday life
Working-class youth in Lviv often have positive, first-hand experiences with rural people and places, as the following examples demonstrate:
You have friends there [in the village], more well-mannered ones. People are a lot more well-mannered than here [in Lviv]
Yeah, a lot of more well-mannered people
more cultured
There are more cultured people, you know, friendlier ones. Like, if a misfortune comes to someone, every time, they help out.
they’re here, but
There are a few here, there are also a lot of good people. But you don’t often find those like there. Everyone in the village, everyone knows that in good time, they can help you.
You can wear what you want. No one ever says anything to you, good or bad.
It doesn’t make a difference, like, how you’re dressed. Everyone looks at your character.
For them, the rural village is a place to relax, to be free from the judgment of urban neighbors, and is a place full of kind people who care about others and are willing to help in whatever way they can. Their comments suggest that urbanities are overly concerned with appearances and lack a kind of “culturedness” that is central to rural village life. Later in the interview, the girls played with various rural dialect terms for “potatoes” as they discussed the benefits of rural life: 2
Apples, buckwheat, everything’s there in the village. But here [in the city] you need to buy it. Whoever doesn’t have money can’t live here, but they can live in the village.
You know, there’s potatoes ((kartozhke; dialect from another region))
potatoes ((kartoplja; standard))
potatoes ((bul’ba; local dialect))
potatoes ((kartoplja))
potatoes ((bul’ba))
((The girls laugh together))
Cool, it’s great to live in the village
Although it is debatable whether the girls use these terms to associate themselves with rural places and people or to mock them, the girls are clearly comfortable using dialect words and understand their meaning. In this instance of verbal play, the girls’ take on the identity of rural dialect speakers who may use different variations of the word “potato” but who all speak a legitimate form of Ukrainian that is understood by others.
Working-class youth also framed their use of nonstandard speech, including the use of rural dialect words and youth slang as “how we usually talk.” As Anatoliy said, “When I came to school I didn’t know any,” but he quickly learned slang from his classmates. Illya claimed that she and her classmates speak it “at school, and in the yard, and with the people we spend time with,” and Solya agreed. Youth slang at school provides students with a form of “privacy,” according to Anatoliy, to which Solya explained, They [the teachers] don’t understand this private youth language; we need to say something to satisfy ourselves.
Their examples of “cool words” often included rural dialect words, foreign words, and standard Ukrainian words that were used in unique ways. Maryna, a working-class girl at a middle-class school, gave rural dialect words as examples of Ukrainian slang:
Well, but in Ukrainian, there are also some words
Well, go on, tell us
mizhpoverkhovyj trot otjah, that’s an elevator
((laughter))
wha-wha-what?
and porokhotjah no, like, how do you say it? porokhotjah-pylosos
right
that’s not slang
Maryna, along with the working-class students above, did not make distinctions between the different kinds of nonstandard speech. For them, rural Ukrainian dialect words could just as easily be used as youth slang as standard Ukrainian words or words borrowed from Russian or English. Furthermore, their youth speech was a part of their everyday speech practices, especially when they wanted “privacy” from adults, such as during breaks between lessons.
The image of the village is an important symbol of the Ukrainian nation (Wilson, 2002), and folk images are regularly featured in national literature, historic films, and even in advertising as a trope for honesty, dedication, and authentic quality. As these examples demonstrate, rural dialects were valued by working-class youth for their concrete connection to particular places where the spirit of the Ukrainian nation gets reproduced, a spirit that gets lost when people move to anonymous urban cities (Peacock, 2012). For working-class youth like Katya and Maryna, rural dialects were just as legitimately Ukrainian as the speech of city folk, and may be even more authentically Ukrainian than standard urban dialects.
Standard urban speech is central
Among the middle-class youth, rural dialects were not valued as a way of creating a youth identity. In contrast to those of the working-class, the middle-class youth drew boundaries between regional dialects and youth slang:
For example, we in Lviv say, well, a word in one way. But in Zakarpathia or the Karapathians, they say something completely different. It’s the same word, that’s a dialect
Yeah
That’s not slang
What do you think when people use, well, dialect words?
It depends, I don’t know. It’s not pretty.
Yeah, it’s not the same. Some think it’s cool, but it’s totally not cool.
Yeah, only people from villages speak it.
Middle-class Ksenya not only separated dialects from slang, but she characterized them as “ugly” speech. In her description, Ksenya contrasts Lvivians’ speech with those of rural regions; the dialects of rural places, not urban ones, are “not pretty.” In this way, the regional distinctions of Lviv are erased and become equated with “standard” Ukrainian, while rural dialects are devalued.
When asked about the use of rural speech by popular musicians, these youth link contemporary rural dialects with older forms of Ukrainian:
What do you think about, well, musicians that use dialects?
like V.V.? They’re cool
and sometimes it’s even nice when it’s only that. If it’s just old Ukrainian
yeah, it’s old Ukrainian
Why is it, is it
Why is it cool? Well, because in everyday life, you don’t hear such things. When you speak with friends, you don’t hear things like that. You can, but these are words in songs. We don’t notice them when we say them, maybe we hear them, but we don’t really talk like that.
While there is a difference between earlier forms of Ukrainian and current rural dialects, these middle-class youth historicize the speech of rural spaces. Ksenya admitted that “you can” hear people speak this way, suggesting that the songs may not merely be in “old Ukrainian.” However, people like her “don’t really talk like that.” The association between rural places and the past is even more evident in the following example: In general, I have a village but, in general, I don’t remember where it is or when I was there the last time … Look, it’s like the 21st century. But in the village, the quality is, I don’t know, the 19th century. (Lyuba)
Youth of both classes recognized the value of tracing oneself back to a particular village, as giving legitimacy to their Ukrainian identity. For middle-class youth who are third- or fourth-generation Lvivians, however, rural places were unimportant to modern life. As Lyuba’s quote shows, not only was rural speech historicized, but so were these rural places themselves. In short, the people who live in villages and speak rural dialects are living remnants of the past.
Middle-class youth also showed ambivalence between the “ugliness” of nonstandard forms and the social capital (Bourdieu, 1990) of youth slang:
yeah, Ukrainian, in general doesn’t have its own slang
Does Ukrainian need its own slang?
no, I think it doesn’t
I think it doesn’t need it. It’s not necessary because then the language would become polluted
Our language is really harmonious, it’s pure
No, in reality, Ukrainian is one of the ten beautiful languages of the world.
In their perspective, Ukrainian does not have its own slang and does not need to have slang; to add such words would only degrade the purity and beauty of the language. These views echoed the prevailing national ideology in Ukraine, which sees standard, literary Ukrainian as “the sole legitimate representation of the Ukrainian nation” (Friedman, 2006: 8), upholding the ideology of linguistic purity. According to Bilaniuk (2004, 2005), linguistic purity involves the avoidance of “mixing” languages in one’s speech, which leads to the devaluing of nonstandard speech. This avoidance extends from the stigmatized practice of surzhyk—where the lexical items, syntactic structures, and phonology of Ukrainian and Russian are combined within a single utterance—to more common practices such as codeswitching (shifting between languages within an interaction).
Middle-class youth grouped both rural speech and slang as linguistic practices that are “ugly.” Simultaneously, however, they divided rural dialects and slang into different conceptual groups that hold different meanings for youth identities of “coolness.” Although dialects were inherently “uncool,” foreign words were used to mark “cool” youth speech locally and regionally:
It’s cool if it’s in Russian. If it’s in Ukrainian, well, it’s not the same. Well, it’s not the same, it’s not like that.
They don’t look at it like that.
Well, in general, it’s more Russian
Basically
Yeah, and slang in basic Russian and more English … For example, in English, they’re normal words. But they’re considered slang for us, the same as in Russian. It’s slang, but they’re normal words for us.
Since, according to these middle-class girls, Ukrainian “doesn’t have its own slang,” the youth used “normal” words in English and Russian as youth slang. Young people need a way to distinguish themselves from their peers (Bucholtz, 2001), which often includes particular ways of speaking (Stenström and Jørgensen, 2009). For these youth, foreign words were used to fill the gap.
The ways in which middle-class youth used standard Ukrainian and Russian words can be seen as a compromise between the national and local ideologies of purism. They wanted to be seen as “cool” youth, but also as local ethnolinguistic Ukrainians who upheld national ideologies of linguistic purity. In order to accomplish these multilayered identities, they claimed to borrow words from foreign languages and to be used as youth slang. In this way, local youth practices reinforced the national ideal of a Ukrainian language that is untarnished, at the same time as it allowed middle-class youth to utilize “dirty” and “improper” words.
Both working-class and middle-class youth held the belief that speaking Ukrainian is an essential element of claiming a Ukrainian identity, and that one should not mix languages when they speak. However, these young people differed as to what forms of Ukrainian were seen to be valid ways of speaking. These conflicting attitudes reflect different class expectations in terms of how language might be a useful tool for creating social capital in the future, whether in local spaces or by engaging with far-off places.
Russian as a way to locally connect to the global
Ukraine has had a long and complex historical, linguistic, and cultural relationship with Russia that is hampered by the lingering ideals and power structures of the Soviet system (Hrytsak, 2009; Kuzio, 2010; Riabchuk, 2012). Under the Soviets, the Ukrainian language was taught in western regions, along with Russian, but the language was more restricted in public life than had been the case when these regions were under previous Polish and Hungarian rule. Nation-building processes, after independence, included promoting Ukrainian as a viable language of power, making it the sole official state language and the language of education in western regions, as well as the “official” language of higher education. To what extent these policies are enacted in everyday practice, however, is varied. A large proportion of the population is functionally Ukrainian–Russian bilingual (Bilaniuk and Melnyk, 2008). However, the status of Russian has been ambiguous (Arel, 1995; Kuzio, 2005).
This complicated relationship between Ukrainian and Russian was not much of an issue for working-class youth. Solya claimed that she knew Russian even though her parents questioned how their daughter could possibly be competent in Russian without ever studying it at school: Well, from television, from books, from literature. A lot of our libraries, not all. Of the available foreign literature, well, you would have to translate it into Ukrainian for yourself, and you end up reading it in Russian, well, and I learned it over time. (Solya)
Working-class youth felt confident that they could communicate in Russian, evidenced in the majority of responses from Solya’s peers on a class survey asking them about the importance of language in their choice of entertainment: My language is Ukrainian, but I love listening to music in Russian and English and also Ukrainian. But Ukrainian language is the best. I listen to foreign music, and watch movies in foreign languages (Russian, English). But of course I listen to music and watch movies in my native Ukrainian. All of my friends know Russian well. There’s good music in English, and Ukrainian, and Russian. It doesn’t make a difference to me what language I watch movies or read magazines in. But this doesn’t mean I don’t care about my language, no, I have great respect for it, although I speak Russian and others. My language is Ukrainian, but I also like foreign language music, movies, and games.
These responses upheld local and national ideologies valuing Ukrainian, while simultaneously embracing Russian and English popular culture. Even Stanislav, an ardent nationalist who firmly believed in the xenophobic slogan, “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” had no qualms using Russian to play World of Warcraft online. “No one would understand you in Ukrainian.” The Russian-language media these youth utilized included cheap Russian translations of popular fiction, and Russian-medium online gaming and social networking, such as VKontakte, which many of these youth had joined by 2013. Despite never having been taught Russian, many knew that it was a language that was essential for engaging with youth living elsewhere. Full competency and mastery of Russian was less important than understanding enough to participate in global youth culture.
Working-class youths’ views that they could and did engage with Russian-language media seem to contradict their deep commitment to the Ukrainian language. However, the practice of what Bilaniuk (2005) has called “nonreciprocal bilingualism”—where one speaker speaks Ukrainian and the other Russian—was common in the national media. For example, television shows often had two co-hosts, or hosts who spoke Ukrainian to Russian-speaking guests, reflecting the reality of a passively bilingual audience without challenging notions against language “mixing.” 3 Ukrainian–Russian bilingualism is a fact of life in Ukraine, albeit a fact that continues to be contentious due to unequal official statuses.
The experience of informally learning a foreign language was reinforced among the working-class youth through stories of Ukrainians working abroad who are able to learn the languages of their host countries simply by living there. In informal talks about Ukrainians working abroad, working-class youth felt that English might be a useful language, but that it was better to “wait and see where you end up.” Echoing the idea of “one state, one language,” these young people felt that one must learn the language of the host country, whether it be Spanish, Italian, or German. A group discussed the struggles with working abroad:
Well, there’s, like, new people there. Another language. You don’t know anyone. You’re far from family, and you have to get used to it
You just need to change your whole life when you get there
You don’t know where to live
Yevhen went on to describe how Ukrainians who work abroad are “industrious” people that “really work.” Although they work hard,
In practice, they don’t come back
But, in practice, yeah, they don’t come back
Some like it there, but some come back
When they’re really old and no one will give them work.
As Solya’s views here show, local and national discourses sometimes equated working abroad with seasonal migration, but often implied that Ukrainians who left the country to work would rarely return:
It’s really not good, not for the country. It’s a betrayal to your county.
You don’t work for the country, and that’s it.
Their own native language, own native home, where they were born, they’re trading it.
They don’t need to trade their religion, culture, or like, their own language for another one.
As these examples suggest, the infrequent return of Ukrainians working abroad was linked to fears of the loss of the Ukrainian nation. Once Ukrainians left their country and adopted the language, culture, and traditions of their host country, they were no longer “Ukrainian” in the eyes of these working-class youth.
While her working-class peers were in agreement that most Ukrainians abroad stopped speaking Ukrainian and quickly adopted the culture of their host countries, Solya had first-hand experiences that challenged these views. She had family living in Paris who kept in contact with the family remaining in Ukraine, and both she and her brother had visited these relatives. Solya described how these relatives spoke both Ukrainian and French, and how they were still very culturally Ukrainian to her. Although Solya disagreed with her classmates who did not have similar experiences, for many working-class youth, the threat to the Ukrainian nation did not come from the Russian-speaking community in Ukraine, but rather from those Ukrainians living in other countries who assimilated to other cultures and failed to transmit Ukrainian traditions to the next generation.
Working-class youth, therefore, embraced a wider variety of “authentic” ways of speaking Ukrainian, and they did not see the use of other languages as a threat to their Ukrainian identities. Rather, it was the personal loss of the Ukrainian language and culture that threatened one’s sense of ethnic and national identity. By moving to other places where Ukrainian is not spoken, they may forget their native language and lose the core of what makes them Ukrainian, a transformation that affects the Ukrainian people as a whole.
Russian as a threat to Ukrainian as a national language of power
Middle-class youth also mentioned interacting with foreign languages, such as the usefulness of knowing an international language when traveling abroad:
English is an international language. And they know and learn English in every country
or Spanish
or German. Now, they say that German is more widespread now because now it’s the European Union. And if Germany leads in the European Union, then its language would be the one to learn because, more or less, they use it in every European country.
Yeah, like German, English
While Ksenya named English as a language that was useful in any country of the world, Vika saw German as a valuable language for a European-oriented experience. Going to another country, however, was about viewing other ways of living: I would like to go abroad to study, but not to live … [People go] because they want to see something other than what we have, not only our Ukraine, that is. Everything is equal across the border. There are other people, other kinds of interactions. (Ksenya)
Ksenya’s mention of studying abroad suggests a very different kind of Ukrainian, one that is in a foreign country in order to experience other cultures and places, rather than seeking better job prospects.
While the working-class youth viewed the Ukrainian nation and language as threatened by Ukrainians who gave up their language and culture when they went to another country, their middle-class peers found the source of threat closer to home. In the class survey, few students mentioned the value of engaging with foreign languages in their daily lives: I think that language does not play a role, whether it’s Russian, or Ukrainian or English or another. Because I like to listen to songs in a foreign language, watch different programs and thereby find out a lot about other countries, their culture and language.
More youth framed the use of languages besides Ukrainian in the media and entertainment industries as problematic: In my choice of entertainment it plays a small role. You would like to hear your own language. Of course it matters! After all, we are Ukrainian, so we must speak the national language. Our nationality is Ukrainian, and so we must speak Ukrainian. It’s important to me that all music, films, games, magazines, etc. are in Ukrainian. Why should there be another language in Ukraine? Ukraine should have Ukrainian, and not Russian, Polish, or another language.
These views suggest that not only was there not enough Ukrainian-language media available, but that, at the most extreme, all media should be in Ukrainian. This monolingual “one state, one language” ideology is echoed in the following example concerning the status of Russian in Ukraine:
If Russian is adopted as the second state language in Ukraine, then, please, really, let ours be adopted as the second one in Russia.
But only after that, like, they can become the second state language.
Even if they had regarded our language with respect from the beginning because-
Why do they have to speak Russian in Ukraine?
If every part of Ukraine has to adopt the language of its neighbors as an official language … then we have to have others. We’d have to institute Polish because we’re closer to Poland.
Well, what I’m saying is we’re against this
Because the state, this is one state and all. You can’t have it in two languages, yeah. Because it wouldn’t be Ukraine without the Ukrainian language.
If Russian was the second language
Well, I don’t know. They wouldn’t speak it.
At first, the girls applied a notion of minority linguistic rights to the hypothetical situation, claiming that Ukrainian had an equal right to be a state language in Russia as Russian did in Ukraine, or Polish did in their region of Ukraine. Then, Nataliya explicitly questioned whether a two-language Ukraine would still be Ukraine. In this example, these youth implied that giving Russian official status would change people’s linguistic behaviors to such a degree that the country would, in effect be “without the Ukrainian language.”
This fear is ever-present in Lviv and is a reflection of failed efforts at promoting Ukrainian nationally. Although higher education was “in Ukrainian” by law, regional practices made this difficult to promote and enforce beyond western regions (Polese, 2010; Richardson, 2008; Rodgers, 2007; Tereshchenko, 2007). Russian and English were on par with Ukrainian in the national music scene, and Russian dominated in popular print media. Young people’s everyday uses of Russian—including using Russian slang, listening to Russian pop music, and engaging with online communities in Russian—also seemed to support this view.
Some middle-class youth, however, claimed a viewpoint more in support of a Ukrainian–Russian notion of the nation, rather than the local anti-Russian ideology: Modern youth know Ukrainian, but like those in Kyiv they speak Russian because they speak Russian. And you can’t do anything about that … It’s the choice of every person, really, we don’t have the right to condemn them because it’s their choice [to speak Russian]. (Ksenya)
Ksenya’s view challenged current local ideas that link language to ethnic identity. Language does not have to reflect one’s ethnic identity. Rather, there are ethnic Ukrainians who speak Russian, and they also have the right to speak their language. This freedom to speak one’s own language is seen as a reflection of Lviv’s historical multiethnic and multilingual European roots (Hrytsak, 2005, 2009), but also conflicts with the idea that all national citizens must learn to speak Ukrainian.
For the middle-class youth, Russian threatened Ukrainian because of people’s interactions with the language in everyday situations. If the language were given equal status as a state language, the current progress of the Ukrainian language would reverse, in their eyes. However, there is the possibility for Ukrainian-speakers to retain their identity even if they travel abroad. Just because they have learned a global language does not mean they have given up their Ukrainian identity.
Conclusion
Although a significant part of Ukrainian nation-building has framed Russia as the “other” (Rodgers, 2007) against which a unique Ukrainian nation can be contrasted, this nation-building can never be totalizing. Regional and local identities, such as those based on linguistic practices and ideologies of language, often trump national goals, especially when the “other” potentially comprises a significant percentage of the population. For example, the view that Ukrainian should be the only state language is not shared in all regions of the country. People in eastern regions often feel excluded and marginalized for their ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences (Tereshchenko, 2007: 704), especially where local practices challenge national reforms (Polese, 2010; Rodgers, 2007). Social relations (Bilaniuk, 2005; Dickinson, 2007), as well as people’s experiences with rural spaces (Peacock, 2011, 2012), can also influence the degree to which a person’s speech is evaluated as “normal” Ukrainian. Finally, while the Ukrainian nation continues to be linked linguistically and culturally to ethnic Ukrainians, the polarizing perspective of pro-European Ukrainian-speakers versus pro-Russian Russian-speakers (Arel, 1995; Kuzio, 2005) ignores class-based differences and the value of Russian as an international language.
This article aimed to illustrate how young people’s everyday engagements with local, regional, national, and global ideologies complicate notions of a coherent, territorially based nation. Young people’s attitudes are shaped, in part, by their class positions as well as the national, regional, and local language ideologies they learn.
Working-class youth find value in a variety of ways of speaking, including standard Ukrainian, rural dialects, and learning other languages informally when the need arises, including Russian. For them, this diversity of speech practices is part of being ethnically Ukrainian. What makes someone no longer Ukrainian is when they no longer speak the Ukrainian language, such as when they move abroad to work and quickly assimilate. Their link between language and ethnicity, however, makes it unlikely that non-ethnics could be viewed as equally Ukrainian if they learn the language.
In contrast, middle-class youth seem to have room for a non-ethnic Ukrainian identity. Their valuing of urban standard Ukrainian and formal language instruction is as applicable to Ukraine as it is to the European countries they aspire to visit someday. However, their fear that Russian will become a co-state language is strong. Although they use Russian in everyday life, it is mainly in ways that help them uphold local and national ideologies of a pure, untarnished Ukrainian. For them, civic nationalism is possible, but only within the idea of “one state, one language.”
Broader issues of youth and nationhood illustrate some of the difficulties in using micro/macro dichotomies, or ignoring the role of scale all together. Transnational immigration often does not excise one’s national identity, especially now that people living in different locales, separated by space and time, can be connected, possibly creating new ways of conceptualizing relations between the local, regional, national, and global.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This manuscript is original and has not been published or submitted elsewhere. I would like to thank the special issue editor, Zsuzsa Millei, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on previous drafts of this article.
Funding
The research presented here was funded by a Fulbright-Hays, the US Department of State Foreign Languages and Area Studies program, the University of California, San Diego, Department of Anthropology, Grinnell College, and the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.