On February 24, 2022 Russia started full-scale war against Ukraine in result of which thousands of people in Ukraine were killed, hundreds of thousands lost their homes, millions were forced to flee their country. The world sees this war and tries to help Ukraine but before this open and obvious war there was another one, the war that the world mostly knows very little or nothing about: the centuries-long war against Ukrainian language and culture. The nowadays war is the continuation of the previous one. That’s why it looks symbolic on February 24, the day of the beginning of the nowadays war, to speak about the preceding war against the Ukrainian language and culture.

During the XVII-XX centuries, Ukraine was split up between various empires and states and the ruling regimes of them tried to assimilate Ukrainians and prevent their self-determination by destroying what made them different: their language and culture. Overall, in those almost 400 years there have been more than 130 prohibitions of the Ukrainian language and its usage in different spheres. Those prohibitions aimed to eradicate Ukrainian by inhibiting or prohibiting its usage in the print, education, church life, official usage and in many other fields. These policies led to the massive Russification of Ukrainians at the times of the Russian Empire and even more in the USSR. It was because of these continuous policies towards Ukrainian that the term of ‘linguicide’ was proposed and for the first time used by the Ukrainian scientist Jaroslav Rudnyckyj who used it to discribe phenomenon of targeted extermination of a particular language.

Different periods of the history of the linguicide of the Ukrainian language have had their own features. The main policy that occupiers of Ukraine used during the XVIII and XIX centuries was to deny the very fact that Ukrainian was a separate language. It was Russian Tsar Peter I who in 1720 for the first time used the word “dialect” regarding the Ukrainian language and he and his ancestors continuously tried to eliminate it from any official use in the Russian Empire. But calling Ukrainian a ‘dialect’ and struggling with its usage in different spheres they didn’t interfere with the Ukrainian language itself: with its lexicography, orthography, terminology. But in the XX century Soviets went further and while hypocritically admitting Ukrainian to be a separate language and pretending to be friendly to it they tried to make a real dialect out of it. Today Ukraine strives to overcome the negative legacy of these policies and undo the centuries of repressions of its language and culture.

The announced seminar with the participation of the Ukrainian linguist Oksana Kononchuk from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv is mostly dedicated to the linguistic ways and methods the Soviets used in their attempt to make a dialect out of the Ukrainian language. The changes made to the Ukrainian orthography, lexicography and terminology, their real impact on the Ukrainian language and nowadays endeavours to overcome them are going to be in the spotlight.

About the ACLC seminar series

The ACLC seminar series is a two weekly lecture series organized by the ACLC, the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication.