My opinion has certainly changed since 2014 on the topic of language. Straw in the wind.

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The blog below represents what I thought in 2013.  Now, as my three children are learning Ukrainian and everyone with whom I interact in the business world speaks Ukrainian, I am the odd man out. I am changing!

I have learned to read it pretty well. Yesterday while waiting for the bank to renew my debit card I read their advertisement for automobile loans and understood the whole thing.  I get the gist of the conversations around my house,  I insert more and more Ukrainian words into my conversation.  But it is still basically Russian.  I need to learn Ukrainian.

I have mentioned Bitcoin five times this year.  Make it six now.  There is something about an asset that jumps from $38,000 to $57,000 in the course of a month that seems to attract the eye.  If you did not read my recent piece on where the money is in the world, let me recommend it again.  By the way, the Ukrainian bank clerk who helped me owns Bitcoin.  A straw in the wind.

Graham

The Russian and Ukrainian languages in Ukraine   2013

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"You're in Ukraine! Why don't you speak Ukrainian?" is a question that catches you up short when you first arrive in Kiev and try your stumbling Russian. You soon learn that native Ukrainians never ask that question. It is only members of the Ukrainian diaspora returned from Canada and the United States, or busybodies working for the United States government.

There are several practical reasons for speaking Russian in Ukraine. Although Ukrainian is the official language, whether or not the government likes it, Russian is the language of business. The business press is almost all written in Russian. Almost any business negotiation in Kyiv is done in Russian. Most scientific, medical, and even cult and new age literature is written in Russian.

The Yanukovich government is certainly not promoting Ukrainian. Yanukovich himself speaks the language poorly; he didn't learn it until it was clear that the presidency was in his reach and he would have to. His predecessor, Victor Yushchenko, has a diaspora wife and had strong backing from the United States. He promoted the Ukrainian language as a way of aligning Ukraine with the West. Yanukovich does not aspire to membership in NATO, and doesn't even seem to be very interested in European Union membership. He's happy enough to let the two languages coexist, and many suspect he really prefers Russian.

Ukrainian was traditionally considered a peasant language. The memory of this is painful to Ukrainian speakers, but it is a fact. Whereas Russian literature has a fairly deep history, Ukrainian literature didn't get started until well into the 19th century. Those authors, Taras Shevchenko and Lesi Ukrainka are much feted today, making many appearances and statues and on the currency, but the body of Russian literature is a lot richer than that of Ukrainian literature.

For most of the 20th century the Soviet Union was one of the major forces in world politics, science, engineering and education. Everything they wrote was of course in Russian, and the scholars who were educated during the Soviet period still work in the Russian language. As a language of affairs, Ukrainian will never be in the same league as Russian.

Ukrainian is the dominant language in only one of the 10 biggest cities in the country – Lviv, the heart of Western Ukraine. Lviv has been an off-again on-again part of Ukraine itself. Within the lifetime of old people it has been under the dominance of Austria-Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Ukraine. Although the people are proudly Ukrainian, Lviv is more distinctive than any other city in the country. In other words, it is part of it but it seems more to belong to its own world. In appearance Lviv is a central European city, while the other major cities in Ukraine are quite clearly Eastern European, from the block style Soviet architecture to the onion domed Orthodox cathedrals everywhere.

Russian was the lingua franca throughout the Soviet empire. It is still extremely useful in a few countries such as Belarus and Kazakhstan. The older generation still speaks Russian in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the other former satellite countries. No other country ever troubled itself to learn Ukrainian. While the value of Russian is constantly declining, it is being replaced by English as the international language of business and travel. It may not be worth your trouble to learn Russian, but Ukrainian is certainly not the alternative. Increasingly, you can get along adequately with just English. The question is not whether Ukrainian will become irrelevant – to all but the diehards, it already is – but whether Russian itself will become irrelevant. The process of globalization is forcing English on everybody. Young professionals in Kyiv see English as an essential part of their education, and the essential tool for communication and international travel and business.

As an aside to polyglots, German, French, Italian and Spanish are almost worthless here. You will notice that there are a few curious cognates that may save you a little bit of work. Ukrainian word for onion is similar to Spanish; the Russians stole the French words for sidewalk, obstetrician and a few other concepts; the Ukrainian and German words for bacon, ham, and taste are fairly similar. However, nobody in Ukraine speaks any of these European languages natively. Anything they know they learned in school, and they almost invariably speak English better than their European languages.

It is a good thing I am writing this blog anonymously, because this is the kind of post that will inevitably generate a lot of hate mail. I can put up with it. I have heard a lot of invective in response to these arguments, but I have yet to get any substantive rebuttal. If you can write some, please educate me.