Ukrainian is a Place I Want to Live
Regina takes the phone, utters a word in Russian, then stops — instantly realizing “Larissa is not one of my Russian-speaking family members” — and starts speaking Ukrainian. In that instant I’m flooded with love. Not because we’ve never spoken Ukrainian to one another, not because it’s the first time I’ve admired this woman who is also fluent in French and English. It’s the event itself: I’m talking to Regina — an Odesan who lives in Paris and is speaking to me from London — in Ukrainian. We don’t talk for a long time, but the exchange feels warm, sincere, and intimate.
Is there something about the Ukrainian language that lends itself to this sort of communication? It would be too easy to romanticize. I think it’s the decision — made by each of us, together — that Ukrainian will be the medium for what we have to say to one another.
After February 24, the decision to speak Ukrainian became a mass phenomenon. Russian, after all, is the language of the enemy.
***
In March I’m walking through the park in Lviv: a young mother with her toddler is making an effort to find the Ukrainian word for swan. “Is it really so similar to the Russian лебедь?” her expression seems to say. Judging from her appearance, she’s well-off and probably came from Kyiv or some city further east. Now, with nobody watching (as opposed to the way some politicians demonstratively speak the national language), she struggles to speak Ukrainian to her son. It’s a personal existential matter. A short distance away, her well-dressed husband paces with his mobile phone, maintaining an animated conversation in Russian.
I had a dream, or maybe it was a fantasy, in springtime Lviv: I imagined an attractive, unfamiliar man who spoke Ukrainian with an accent.
“So what?” you may ask. “People speak English with an accent all the time.” Until recently, people who spoke Ukrainian with an accent were incredibly rare. I was one.
Ukrainian speakers generally fall into one of two categories. Some grew up speaking Ukrainian at home, naturally. Others have made a point of learning and speaking it as conscientious Ukrainian citizens. Members of both groups take pride in speaking it properly, weeding out Russian words that may slip in through ignorance or habit, emphasizing the grammar and turns of phrase that are uniquely Ukrainian. With no academy devoted to preserving the purity of the Ukrainian language, it’s up to individuals to promote and police the right way to speak it. My friends are always quick to point out when I make a grammatical mistake or use English syntax to organize my Ukrainian words.
When I first arrived in Ukraine, speaking my distinct diaspora dialect, the locals couldn’t always understand me, especially in central Ukraine, further from big cities. It wasn’t that these people had never heard Ukrainian, but I suspect they’d never heard someone who spoke differently. Their ears weren't trained to be flexible enough to accept my unusual expressions, my intonation, and even the slowness with which I formulate thoughts. My friends were also impatient Soviet-raised Ukrainians who would try to finish my sentences, tell me what I’m thinking or interject with “just say it in English” as if I were performing a translation in my mind as they struggled to wait for the words to come out.
Now it is I who listens patiently as my friend Artur struggles to find the right Ukrainian words. Before February 24, he had always spoken Russian eloquently and unabashedly; this did not make him any less Ukrainian, he was from Dnipro. Our conversations manifested that classic Ukrainian phenomenon where one person speaks Russian and the other Ukrainian, and while both understand each other, each prefers to keep speaking their own language. I observe how my friends like Artur, Kostia, Dima, Andriy now make a visible effort to speak Ukrainian. Struggling to find the words to express themselves, they also compromise a piece of their identity — being able to demonstrate their intelligence deftly, which was easy in Russian. Their previous sense of self was entwined with the language in which they learned mathematics and programming, in which they read literature, poetry, and philosophy, in which they expressed their love.
Why is it thrilling to hear people speaking Ukrainian with an accent, making mistakes? I’ve met foreigners this year, like Kevin, Bill, and Marcel, who are so drawn to Ukraine’s resistance, culture, and people that they’re learning the Ukrainian language. The ability to assimilate new, imperfect speakers is a sign of a thriving, mature language, one with enough flexibility and generosity to take some “abuse.” When somebody puts words together in an unconventional way (even if out of ignorance, the way my Ukrainian friends speaking English sometimes construct the most delicious phrases), it could be perceived as an innovation rather than a threat.
***
Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t like speaking Ukrainian as a kid. It quickly became the language I “had to” speak in certain situations: to my revered, strict grandparents, in Ukrainian Saturday school, during summer camp (under constant threat of scolding). My Ukrainian had no sense of humor. Jokes in my group of nerdy diaspora friends were based on translation: we were all bilingual, and translating the lyrics of a sentimental/brutal Ukrainian folk song into prosaic English was all it took to bring us to tears.
The territory of modern day Ukraine has historically been home to many languages, including Ukrainian, Yiddish, Crimean Tatar, Russian, Polish, German, and Surzhyk — a localized hybrid of Ukrainian and Russian. The capacity to adapt one’s language to the surrounding context — whether at the scale of a reigning empire or a conversation between two people — is a Ukrainian talent that is often taken for granted by the people themselves.
Only after living for many years in Ukraine, discovering how much the language varies from region to region, did I suddenly wonder: how did the Ukrainian spoken in the North American diaspora — a specific version of early 20th-century western Ukrainian with some Polish, German and even Ukrainian-sounding English thrown in — come to be one consistent language? If my grandmother grew up in a village in western Ukraine and her best friend in America was from the area of Ukraine that was part of the Russian empire, what transformations did their respective native languages undergo so that, by the time I was growing up in America, I learned their Ukrainian language? Did Ukrainian immigrants argue amongst themselves over which was the correct term for this or that? Did they make jokes about it?
Most of the best experimental contemporary art, performances, and discussions about culture in Kyiv circa 2005-2013 were happening in Russian. It’s a language I learned unsystematically and incompletely through immersion, by listening to recorded lectures of Russian philosophers, and working for a few years with Russian art institutions. In Kyiv, my artist friends and I would read philosophical texts in English and Russian and discuss them in Russian (with me speaking Ukrainian). While we wrote our event announcements in Ukrainian on principle, we pondered why English or Russian lent themselves better to formulating our complex artistic concepts. Ukrainian felt a bit crude, lacking the nuance and sophistication for our subtle thoughts. Perhaps our Ukrainian was unsophisticated and underdeveloped compared to the languages in which we were respectively more fluent?
***
In the month following Russia's 2022 invasion, my friend Mykhailo Ziatin wrote a philosophical treatise reflecting on Ukraine’s Soviet heritage in Ukrainian. This Crimean-born, Kharkiv-educated philosopher had until recently lectured, argued, and proposed new ideas using intricate Russian. The language of Ziatin’s “Ukrainian Theorem” is spacious — maybe because of its rigid mathematical logic, or maybe because Ukrainian is not his native language — which makes the reading joyful without compromising the demands it makes on the reader to think.
Ukrainian is enlivened by the power and energy of the people who use it. Thinking in this language contributes to its discursive heritage. The connections between our experience as Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language grow sturdier with every intellectual debate, piece of writing, Facebook post, intimate conversation. This language is imbued with our early national aspirations, Soviet history, and the dignity with which Ukrainian has served in wartime.
Today it is illegal, when providing emergency medical care to a wounded Ukrainian soldier, to speak Russian. If a victim wakes up hearing Russian, they may think they are in enemy hands and act rashly to protect themselves. It is a matter of personal and national security, like the passwords at checkpoints along major roads and entrances to cities throughout Ukraine designed to expose a Russian accent. “Slava Ukrayini!” is now declared all over the world. This concatenation of sounds conveys respect for those who fight for what they believe in and a wish for victory over evil.
A language is a common space, a place, formed by the speakers in the act of speaking it. Ukrainians’ multilingualism, along with their talent for using different languages to fit various cultural contexts (think of Zelensky’s near-daily video appearances in political halls around the world), certainly deserves admiration. But having your own language that you share with your people — knowing the language is the key to belonging to this group called “Ukrainians” — is fundamental.
Ukraine’s defense has been so successful because of the mass participation of Ukraine’s people, each contributing in their own way. The personal choice to speak Ukrainian is part of what creates the Ukrainian political nation fighting for its freedom, one that will endure long after its military victory. This is the language in which we will debate our cultural policy, beyond simply writing it down in the official state language. When the language in which we are political coincides with the language in which we speak to our children and our friends, the individual citizens become the central driving life-force of the nation. This is a powerful antidote to ideology, which still poses a great threat (encroaching from the Soviet past) to Ukraine’s political existence.
Larissa Babij is a Ukrainian-American writer, translator and dancer based in Kyiv, Ukraine since 2005. Her writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, The Odessa Review, Entropy, Springerin, and other publications. She reports on living in Ukraine at war, being part of the country’s civic–military defense, at a Kind of Refugee