Thread: Members of Ukrainian parliament fight over Russian language

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.

I hope you did not misunderstand me! Perhaps my post came out wrong - I simplified and did not consider how it would sound to a British person. From a Russian perspective, according to themselves, they don't even have accents, and the expression RP is not known outside of Britain, I think. I should have said BBC English though.

I am not proposing that you should speak RP and I don't like the accent snobbery in the UK. Because of this, I retain a slight foreign accent, just to avoid people putting a label on me. My point was, some people in the UK want to change their accent but cannot. It's harder than you might think. A person that was very close to me wanted to speak less RP and more London or Derbyshire. But he simply wasn't able to. His accent was too posh and trying to speak local just made him sound ludicrous. An Indian friend of mine wanted to reduce his Indian accent, and actually took lessons for it! He was a completely fluent English speaker, but he felt that people had a stereotypical view of him because of his accent. Very ambitious person......

I like Scots but in its most extreme forms I can't understand it, that's all. I prefer it if the BBC sticks to "standard Scottish", Welsh or neutral English because a strong accent is distracting when watching the news. So shoot me....

If you speak Scots, did you see the thread where somebody was asking about Robert Burns?
Translate to modern English

Originally Posted by xdns

The "5th Channel" launched an advertising campaign against official recognition of Russian language in Ukraine:

Я хочу розмовляти українською мовою! - YouTube
Єдина державна мова - українська! - YouTube
Скажи "НІ" казнокрадам і українофобам! - YouTube
Я не хочу жити в резервації! - YouTube

Oh dear....! And like someone said, this is not like Dutch and French, they are similar languages. Not that I can understand Ukrainian though! But since it-ogo said, people could practically speak one and respond in the other (that's exactly what we do in Scandinavia and it works fine). What's the point of forcing people to use a different language than they are used to, when it is a local language?

I imagine if somebody came to me and said that I have to fill in all papers in Danish and get Danish TV etc, etc. and Swedish would be pushed to the side. I would find that extremely irritating and insulting. I like Danish/Norwegian precisely because they are never forced on me. If they were, like one time at university, when some Danish books were mandatory reading, I'd hate it.

Likewise the dominance of English in business. It is one thing for a French or German person if the CHOOSE to speak English. It is quite another to more or less be bullied or forced to. I am glad I speak English, but I am sometimes very ambivalent of the backside of it....

Originally Posted by Hanna

I hope you did not misunderstand me! Perhaps my post came out wrong - I simplified and did not consider how it would sound to a British person. From a Russian perspective, according to themselves, they don't even have accents, and the expression RP is not known outside of Britain, I think. I should have said BBC English though.

I am not proposing that you should speak RP and I don't like the accent snobbery in the UK. Because of this, I retain a slight foreign accent, just to avoid people putting a label on me. My point was, some people in the UK want to change their accent but cannot. It's harder than you might think. A person that was very close to me wanted to speak less RP and more London or Derbyshire. But he simply wasn't able to. His accent was too posh and trying to speak local just made him sound ludicrous. An Indian friend of mine wanted to reduce his Indian accent, and actually took lessons for it! He was a completely fluent English speaker, but he felt that people had a stereotypical view of him because of his accent. Very ambitious person......

I don't accept your premise. Sorry

For one thing, losing one's accent was the done thing for the aspiring middle classes for many many years and many millions of Brits did so successfully while it was the fashionable thing to do, and there are still a good number who do so now in spite of it being generally considered pretentious rather than admirable. We haven't magically lost the ability, only the motivation. Of course there will be examples of people who want to lose their accent and simply can't, but you can't generalise from those specific cases.

Secondly, I don't accept that there is accent snobbery as such any more. Accent snobbery was looking down at people who spoke with regional accents because having such an accent was considered a sign of being working class and uneducated. What we have now is accent rivalry, or accent xenophobia, where people become targets because their accent is out of place or different, not because it's "common".

And thirdly, you need to be sure you're talking about accent and not dialect. You mention "BBC English", but if you watch the BBC nowadays you will hear lots of different accents, some of them quite strong. What you won't [often] hear is regional (non-standard) grammar or vocabulary.

If you speak Scots, did you see the thread where somebody was asking about Robert Burns?
Translate to modern English

Hadn't seen it, but have now!

This is not something worth quibbling about - we don't disagree about the principle, just on what it means and how some people view it. It's not an objective matter.

The BBC wrote the following about the language situation in Ukraine today.

A contentious bill to boost the status of the Russian language in Ukraine has passed its first hurdle in parliament, in the teeth of strong opposition. MPs from the ruling Party of the Regions passed the bill in its first reading, with 234 votes in the 450-seat lower house.

Fighting erupted in the chamber when the bill was proposed last month.
The bill grants Russian, mother tongue of most people in east and south Ukraine, "regional language" status.

It will become law if approved at a second reading later this year and signed off by President Viktor Yanukovych, who is seen by his critics as being close to Moscow.

While Ukrainian would remain the country's official language, Russian could be used in courts, hospitals and other institutions in Russian-speaking regions.

Opponents of the bill, notably the Fatherland bloc of jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, argue the bill would undermine the status of Ukrainian, the language which predominates in the centre and west.
'Invaders and Russifiers' Party of the Regions MPs surrounded the speaker's tribune in parliament
On Tuesday, Yanukovych MPs formed a cordon around parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn to allow him to put the bill to a vote.


Noisy, rival demonstrations for and against the bill were held outside the parliament in the capital, Kiev.
Supporters held posters declaring "Two languages - one country" and "Our children have a right to learn in their mother tongue".


"We want medical prescriptions written in Russian, not only in Ukrainian," Donetsk resident Lyudmila Nyronova, 69, told Reuters news agency.


Opponents of the bill chanted "Shame!" and brandished placards which read "One state, one language", "Invaders and Russifiers - get out of Ukraine" and "Stop dividing Ukraine".


According to AFP news agency, each rally attracted about 3,000 people.


Some 24% of Ukrainians consider Russian their first language, according to data from the CIA World Factbook.

See highlighted text just above. CIA Factbook, hmmm....
Is 24% the correct figure? I

Originally Posted by Hanna

The BBC wrote the following about the language situation in Ukraine today.
See highlighted text just above. CIA Factbook, hmmm....
Is 24% the correct figure? I

When have you started trusting the CIA?!! And, especially, their 'facts'?!! And also the BBC!! When have you started to trust those enemies of the people?! It's all a lie. There's no language problem in Ukraine. People there are free to speak lots of languages at any time they want and it's not up to the BBC and the CIA to ignite the perfectly peaceful situation that is not bothering any person in Ukraine. All the protesters are paid by the CIA and the BBC is just happy to report on the havoc they themselves imagined. Those lazy people who posed as the 'protesters' do neither work nor study, but were just paid enough to show up for two minutes, make a picture, and go home.

Ok, clever point Croc.............

I can understand both sides in the conflict, but I find it hard to sympathize with denying old people the right to read a prescription in a language that they have always used, in a country where they have always lived... Or the right of somebody on trial to be tried in his own language, in his native country...

I think they are right to protect the status of Ukrainian, but it should not be at the expense of near human-rights violations like the ones that I mentioned, that are also mentioned in the BBC article.

Here is an American site which is trying to present the facts, sans agenda as far as I can tell. Interesting reading.
Ukraine Languages: Dealing with Ukraine's Bilingual Society

Originally Posted by Hanna

I can understand both sides in the conflict, but I find it hard to sympathize with denying old people the right to read a prescription in a language that they have always used, in a country where they have always lived...

There's no conflict. The conflict is made up by the CIA to ignite the situation and establish new NATO bases on the historic European soil. The old people have no trouble reading their medical prescription in Ukrainian. It's just one of them - Lyudmila Nyronova, 69 - was paid a few dollars to say the opposite. And who can read the physicians' prescriptions anyways? Be them written in Satanic, that would make no difference to the ordinary people who make up the majority of the nation.

Originally Posted by Hanna

Ok, clever point Croc.............

It's just the 'ad extra absurdum' is very popular in MR this summer...

Originally Posted by Hanna

The BBC wrote the following about the language situation in Ukraine today.



See highlighted text just above. CIA Factbook, hmmm....
Is 24% the correct figure? I

No. The number is certainly underestimated.

Originally Posted by Hanna

What's the point of forcing people to use a different language than they are used to, when it is a local language?

The point is that in fact the positions of Russian language in Ukraine is much stronger than that of Ukrainian language. Russian is the de-facto uniform standard language to speak "outside one's village" while "inside village" they normally speak local dialects. Plus there are many 99%-95% Russian-speaking regions and cities. Pro-Ukrainian people argue that without forced support Ukrainian language will vanish in few generations.

Originally Posted by it-ogo

The point is that in fact the positions of Russian language in Ukraine is much stronger than that of Ukrainian language. Russian is the de-facto uniform standard language to speak "outside one's village" while "inside village" they normally speak local dialects. Plus there are many 99%-95% Russian-speaking regions and cities. Pro-Ukrainian people argue that without forced support Ukrainian language will vanish in few generations.

The sort of "patterns" of when you speak Ukrainian vs Russian are fascinating, I think. When did you, yourself speak Ukrainian last, for example? I remember you saying that you sometimes regret that you don't speak it often enough at home? I suppose there are certain

Perhaps because I study Russian, I have been overly partial to Russian in this discussion. I don't know. And I am aware that it is not my business in any form or shape. With Latvia, I feel I have a right to a small say; after all they are in the EU and there are really strong ties with Scandinavia where I come from.

I approve of these sorts of language-protective-measures when they are done in Wales or in Northern Scandinavia. In both these places it is essentially "too late" anyway, though. Mostly old people and rural people are really fluent in the local language. But this is the first time I have heard of "language protection measures" that are actually perceived as intrusive by speakers of the larger language. I suppose the situation in Ukraine is quite unique.

But I foresee that we will have this situation with local language vs English, in about 50-100 years in places like the Netherlands and Scandinavia unless something change. The really sad things is that some of the biggest English proponents don't even speak English very well! They insist on using English even when there is no good reason, and then they write or speak it poorly, putting themselves at a disadvantage in comparison with native speakers.