Copypasting this (still draft version) here in full, before radically shortening it for my master thesis.

Historical context and bilingualism in the modern Ukrainian language

L’Ukraine a toujours aspiré à être libre
“Ukraine has always aspired to be free.” Voltaire, 1731 ¹

This section describes the bilingual nature of Ukraine’s society and the impact of historical state policies on the modern development of the language.

The ongoing Russian invasion is viewed by many as a continuation of a long-standing historical pattern, rather than an isolated incident.

This section doesn’t attempt to justify or challenge any particular position regarding the events described, nor is meant to be a definitive account of the history of the language.

But I believe this perspective is important to understanding the current linguistic landscape in Ukraine, as well as the linguistic challenges and phenomena that had a direct relevance on this thesis. (TODO mention how and which tasks are impacted by this)

A historical overview

• todo: more synonyms for ‘policy’
• todo: better title
• todo: sources for everything-everything-everything
• sources
  • 1987 book about the entire topic [^@krawchenko1987social]
  • Article The Executed Renaissance: The Book that Saved Ukrainian Literature from Soviet Oblivion | Article | Culture.pl
  • Keeping a record is the best book on this [^@1130282272476965120]

In Ukraine itself, the status of Ukrainian (its only official language) varies widely, but for a large part of Ukrainians the question was never too much on the foreground (until recently, that is).

A significant number of people in Ukraine are bilingual (Ukrainian and Russian languages), and almost everyone can understand both Russian and Ukrainian.²
The reasons for this include Ukraine’s geographical and cultural proximity to Russia, and was to a large extent a result of consistent policy first of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union.

The suppression of Ukrainian in the Russian Empire

In the Russian Empire, the broader imperial ideology sought to assimilate various ethnicities into a single Russian identity (with Russian as dominant language), and policies aimed at diminshing Ukrainian national self-consciousness were a facet of that³. TODO source

Ukrainian (then officially called little Russian language/малорусский язык) was stigmatized as a (uncultured town folks’) dialect of Russian, unsuited for ‘serious’ literature or poetry — as opposed to the great Russian language (not editorializing, it was literally called that; these phrasing applied to the names of ethnicities as well, Russia as great Russia and Ukraine as little Russia; the extent to which this referred broader cultural attitudes is a discussion out of scope of this Thesis). (TODO footnote to ‘War and Punishment’ for more on this)

The history of Ukrainian language bans is long enough to merit a Wikipedia page itemizing all the attempts, ⁴ with the more notable ones in the Russian Empire being the 1863 Valuev Circular (forbidding the use of Ukrainian in religious and educational printed literature) and the Ems Ukaz, a decree by Emperor Alexander II banning the use of the Ukrainian language in print (except for reprinting old documents), forbidding the import of Ukrainian publications and the staging of plays or lectures in Ukrainian (1876). (TODO sources for both)

The redefinition of Ukrainian in the Soviet Union

• TODO [^@marshall2002post] has many sources for this! The first decade of Soviet Union brought Ukrainisation as part of a new Soviet nationalities policy, and the use of Ukrainian in different areas was promoted. The reason for this was chiefly ideological — the ghosts of the old empire were considered a danger and encouraging formerly-suppressed cultures was one way to fight them — but nevertheless, this period led to a short-lived period of flourishing for Ukrainian literature and culture in general.

The 1928 grammar reform (sometimes called Skrypnykivka after the minister of education Skrypnyk) passed during this period, drafted by a commitee of prominent Ukrainian linguists, writers, and teachers synthetized the different dialects into a single orthography to be used across the entire territory.

The Ukrainian writers and intellectuals of that period became known as “the executed Renaissance”: most of them were purged in the years to follow, after the Soviet Union took a sharp turn towards Russification in the late 1920s and in the multiple waves of purges that followed. (Most prominent members of committee behind Skrypnykivka were repressed as well; Skrypnyk himself committed suicide in 1933.)

A new ‘orthographic’ reform was drafted in 1933. It had the stated goal of removing alleged burgeoise influences of the previous one. Andriy Khvylia⁵, the chairman of the new Orthography Commission described in his 1933 book “Eradicate, Destroy the Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism on the Linguistic Front” (TODO source) how the new reform eliminates all “deadly conservative norms established by nationalists” that “focused the Ukrainian language on the Polish and Czech borgeois cultures (…) and set a barrier between the Ukrainian and Russian language”.

In practice the reform brought the Ukrainian language much closer to Russian in many ways:

• Grammatically, by introducing relatively major changes in declension paradigms, plurals, especially targeting grammatical structures absent in Russian. The letter ґ (absent in the Russian alphabet) was dropped.
• Changes in the vocabulary were also massive: the spelling of foreign-derived words and proper names were changed to fit Russian patterns. For example, the German diphthong ei (IPA: [aɪ], approx. English “eye”), in Ukrainian ай with the same sound, became the Russian ей (IPA: [ɛj], approx. in English “they”), changing surnames like Einstein / Айнштайн (IPA: [ˈajnʃtajn])[^44] to Ейнштейн (IPA: [ˈɛjnʃtɛjn]). Genders of words were changed.
• Terminology: there was an effort to eliminate Ukrainian-specific vocabulary, much of which was just replaced with the (sometimes completely different) Russian equivalents. This was quite explicit, to the point that publishing houses regularly received lists of words to avoid. This increased the dependence of Ukrainian on Russian science.

Many Ukrainian writers, poets and dissidents kept using the ‘old’ orthography, as well as the Ukrainian community outside the Soviet Union.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there were many proposals for restoring the original orthography, but only the letter ґ was restored. In 2019 a new version of the Ukrainian orthography was approved, which restored some of the original rules as ’legal’ variants but without mandating any of them.