Thread: Members of Ukrainian parliament fight over Russian language

Originally Posted by Hanna

I am just curious - how do you Ukrainians know what language to use in different social situations?
With a stranger at the bus stop... in the market.... at university.. in a shop or department store...?

Regardless of where an informal conversation with a stranger happens (between locals) the language is generally depends on the language used in this region, and most regions are pretty homogeneous in this regard (with slight deviation between cities and country areas). In other words there's no social rule that in a department shop you should speak one language, and at a beauty salon another - it's usually one language all the way.

In areas where both languages are widespread (like Kiev) strangers on the street can swap to one language or the other, but quite often they speak both - i.e. each one uses his/her own language of preference. It does not cause any difficulties in understanding, since an absolute majority of Ukrainians are bilingual (at least at comprehension level).

In official or semi-official situations, especially if the target audience is all-Ukrainian (political speeches or announcements, for example), Ukrainian is used almost exclusively, since it's required by law. It's also required of most state office clerks, who communicate with public. But if the said event is local (in a Russian speaking region) most people use Russian since there's no one to tell them otherwise.

Do you always speak the same language with some people, or do you vary even with your friends?
What happens if a particular friend is better at one of the languages while the other prefers the other language?

It's an interesting question, I think it's possible to talk with different groups of friends in different languages, but said friends should probably have drastically different backgrounds...
Personally I do not have anyone to speak to in Ukrainian here. I grew up in a very homogeneous region (I was 11 when I've fleetingly seen a genuine Ukrainian-speaking person for the first time in real life (not on TV)). later I moved to another region, but it's also mostly Russian speaking, or rather cities are almost exclusively Russian-speaking and villagers and people from small towns speak "surgik" (a mix of both languages).
But I had a friend at Uni, who spoke Russian (as everyone else), and only after her Dad visited, I realized that they spoke "surgik" only at home, because she switched between two seamlessly. It was cool (even if "surgik" is often considered a "hillbilly" dialect). In other words, most people adapt to general language setting, if they move somewhere with different language preferences, so there's no Babel confusion.


Originally Posted by gRomoZeka

But I had a friend at Uni, who spoke Russian (as everyone else), and only after her Dad visited, I realized that they spoke "surgik" only at home, because she switched between two seamlessly. It was cool (even if "surgik" is often considered a "hillbilly" dialect). In other words, most people adapt to general language setting, if they move somewhere with different language preferences, so there's no Babel confusion.

Interesting that she was able to switch between Surgik and Russian. If you take people in the UK who speak in an accent, they cannot just switch it off and speak Queen's English - only if they had training in speaking "accentless". I knew a few "posh" people from Southern Sweden who speak in the (terrible!!) accent from there with their local friends and standard Swedish with others. But normal local people there cannot do it, they are stuck with their accent.....

In Belarus, as I mentioned, I noticed that some people were speaking in accent. They pronounced the leter "г" as "h", for example. It's kind of funny that Belarus has never been a separate country before, yet it does not have the same problems with language that Ukraine has. Belarus instead, has lots of national campaigns going on, to make people feel "Belarussian" even if they originally are from somewhere else in the ex USSR or imperial Russia. They have some signs and official paperwork in Belarussian, but I did not hear ANYONE actually speak Belarussian, and I kept asking people about it. They all said "Oh, I wish I knew it, but I don't know it very well..." and things like that.

This is an example of from the Belarus pro-nationalism campaign:

Originally Posted by Hanna

Interesting that she was able to switch between Surgik and Russian. If you take people in the UK who speak in an accent, they cannot just switch it off and speak Queen's English - only if they had training in speaking "accentless".

Why would they want to? The stigma associated with regional accents hasn't really existed for many, many decades, and learning RP went out of fashion shorty after the war and sounds totally absurd to any modern ears (at least ears not belonging to a person named Windsor). It's not that Brits are incapable of speaking "neutral" English, rather it's become generally accepted that there is no such thing as "neutral English" in the first place - no one geographical area or social caste has any more right to claim ownership over the language than any other.

That's not to say that we don't modulate our accents depending on the context, of course we do, but knocking the edge of an accent for the sake of communication isn't the same as trying to hide it.

I grew up speaking Scots at home, then when I started school I was punished, occasionally even beaten, for using anything other than standard English because back then Scots was considered by the British establishment to be a degenerate, vulgar form of regional English rather than a language in its own right as is the case today. Imagine, being beaten for using the language of Robert Burns in a school not 50 miles from where he lived and wrote! So you can be damn sure I and my fellow students learned to code-switch automatically at a pretty young age, speaking Scots amongst ourselves and at home and speaking Scottish Standard English while in school or whenever we found ourselves outwith our local area.

And I still do so today. I've been away from my local area for twenty years and away from Scotland for ten so the edges have certainly been knocked off my accent, but sit me down in my old local with a group of my old friends and within a few minutes I'll be unintelligible to anyone born more than 5 miles away.