Contested tongues: Language politics and cultural correction in Ukraine (review)

In today’s Ukraine perhaps no issue better demonstrates the passions of competing political and cultural forces than the language question. Ukrainian is the state language, but there is a constant drumbeat in Parliament from representatives of the southern and eastern regions for Russian to be accorded equivalent official status. The tension between them is centuries old, and yet there are many complexities in the relationship that are ignored or underappreciated. Laada Bilaniuk has written Contested tongues: Language politics and cultural correction in Ukraine to clarify this dynamic situation. She analyzes the struggle between Ukrainian and Russian on Ukrainian territory in historical perspective, then turns to the role of language politics and ideologies with their corrective tendencies, and finally explicates the phenomenon of Ukrainian-Russian hybridity, so-called surzhyk, which serves as a counterpoint to standardization.

Following the introduction, in which Bilaniuk describes her own Ukrainian émigré background and the conditions under which she conducted fieldwork in Ukraine before and after independence (1991), she presents chapters on (i) language and ideologies of correction, (ii) language and power at the level of the individual in a changing society, (iii) the history of ideological categories and corrections, (iv) surzhyk, (v) correction and the struggle over linguistic status, and (vi) hidden tensions and multiple forces in the language question. In an epilogue, she discusses the languages of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. An appendix at the end contains a comparative list of common Ukrainian and Russian forms.

In Chapter 1, Bilaniuk introduces the problem of Ukrainian-Russian interaction from the perspective of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. She complains that general linguists (structuralists and generativists) focus too much attention on the study of language in the ideal, language as essence, whereas language in reality is a messier object of analysis with all manner of variation and fuzziness of boundaries. In the Ukrainian context it is culture, and more specifically the power controlling it, that seeks to eliminate individual speech patterns in favor of an artificially designated “named” language reflecting the culturally designated values of the ethnos or nation. This mythic association results in determined hierarchization, producing a favored system of speech accorded the status standard, with all deviations from this chosen model then marked as flawed in some sense and subject to corrective measures by the authorities in charge. It is such power, whether from the ruling elite or its institutions, that distinguishes language and dialect. Therefore to speak of the Ukrainian language or the Russian language is already to take a political stance. Whose Ukrainian language? Whose Russian language? The winners of historical struggles get to write histories and determine linguistic standards and Ukraine is no different from other lands in this respect.

Bilaniuk properly distinguishes between perception and production of language. Two speakers may perceive that they are speaking standard Ukrainian, but in fact one may be speaking in accordance with declared Ukrainian norms, whereas the other may actually speak a hybrid with considerable Russian admixture. Bilaniuk does an excellent job of describing the complexities of the linguistic interface of Ukrainian and Russian, tracing the ideologically constructed status of Ukrainian in the Russian imperial context as a marginalized “low culture” tongue, a degraded form of Russian, and ultimately a symbol of Ukrainian resistance that elicited official suppression in the nineteenth century and, after a brief respite in the 1920s, heavy-handed Russification in the Soviet period. This checkered history could not help but have an effect on popular attitudes in Ukraine towards Ukrainian, some viewing it as a vital symbol of an independent Ukraine struggling to move out of Russia’s orbit, others perceiving it as provincial and specifically anti-Russian, both views affected by questions of self identity, social status, and conceptions of nation-building. She provides material from the field to illustrate connections between language and power, language and perception, language and social categorization. Linguistic correction, a corollary of standardization and hence of political power and...