By Galina Korol | 2024-02-05

KYIV -- Ukrainians, even those who grew up speaking Russian, are abandoning the language of the country that invaded them, research shows.

Scholars from the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich, Britain's University of Bath and the Technical University of Munich used artificial intelligence and statistical analysis to study more than four million messages posted by 63,000 Ukrainian users of the social network X (formerly Twitter) between January 2020 and October 2022.

The authors of the study concluded that Ukrainians began switching to the Ukrainian language even before Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, but the trend increased significantly after the onset of the war.

"Apparently the war is causing people to increasingly turn away from the Russian language," said Daniel Racek, lead author of the team's study, which has been published in the journal Communications Psychology.

The observed change in behavior is a political reaction to the war, the researchers found.

"Users want to distance themselves from Russia and any support for the war, and so they consciously decide to use less Russian and in many cases avoid using Russian altogether," according to an LMU news release January 10 announcing the outcome of the study.

Language shift

Interest in the Ukrainian language has grown among foreigners as well, said Mila Shevchuk, a Kyiv-based philologist, teacher of the Ukrainian language and moderator for Ukraine's Yedyni ("United") conversation clubs.

"For example, a study back in the spring of 2022 found that in Duolingo interest in the Ukrainian language increased by almost 600% in the first months after the full-scale invasion," she told Kontur, referring to the free language-learning app with fun, short lessons.

The war sparked foreigners' interest in learning more about Ukraine and many of them even discovered that Ukraine has its own language, she said.

The tardiness of this realization for so many outsiders is unsurprising, because even Ukrainians, especially in the eastern regions, were long inculcated with the myth of the "native Russian language."

"Learning a language is very closely connected with the study of traditions and history," Shevchuk said. "People are coming to a Ukrainian identity... They are studying history and learning what the Soviet occupation was."

For the first time in their lives, many Ukrainians are discovering that the Russian language was imposed on Ukrainians for centuries with efforts to convince them that Russian, not Ukrainian, is their native language, she added.

This phenomenon in sociolinguistics is known as "language shift," Shevchuk said.

"There was the Ukrainian language, and the Russian language began to displace it, to shift it. And now there is the phenomenon of a reverse language shift," she said. "That is, the Ukrainian language has reconquered and is continuing to take back its territories."

'I should speak Ukrainian'

Ukrainian journalist Tatyana Onofriyenko, a Kherson native, said that despite earning a university degree in Ukrainian philology, she spoke primarily Russian with family members, in society and at work.

She considered Russian her mother tongue, but after fleeing to Germany with her daughter to escape Russia's war against Ukraine, she realized that the language one speaks makes a difference.

"Once my daughter and I went to a supermarket and communicated with each other in Russian while picking out groceries," Onofriyenko told Kontur. "We go outside, and this older man is standing there, and he says to me in Russian, 'You should at least be ashamed for speaking so loudly.'"

"And I felt so ashamed," she said. "At first, I thought, he's probably telling me that since I am Ukrainian, I should speak Ukrainian. And I asked ... what language should I speak? Then he started saying something about the war and what a bad president we have... And I realized that he was Russian and the shared language is what connected us."

After this incident, Onofriyenko said, she decided that she and her daughter would switch to Ukrainian so that everyone knows their nationality.

'I don't want to speak Russian'

Valeriya, who has been living in Kyiv for eight years, also decided to abandon her mother tongue following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Born and raised in Krasnodar province, Russia, at 18, Valeriya moved to Moscow, where she graduated from university and met her husband. His work took the young family first to Israel, and then in 2016 to Ukraine.

She declined to give her last name because her husband serves in the Ukrainian army.

"When I arrived ... I didn't understand what people were saying," she told Kontur. "I turned on the TV and ... realize that I don't understand what they're saying at all."

Living in Kyiv, Valeriya eventually learned to understand, read and even write Ukrainian, but she could not speak the language. She said there was no need, because Russian was widespread in Ukraine.

However, after the start of the full-scale war and all the Russian atrocities committed in Bucha, Mariupol and other cities, Valeriya realized that she no longer wanted anything to do with the occupiers.

"I remember having feelings that I never had before," she said.

"I can probably compare it to a child who ... at some point finds out that his father is a serial maniac who eats people and has raped and killed 100 women," Valeriya said.

"At some point I caught myself thinking that I don't want to speak Russian. That is, I don't want to have anything to do with what used to be native for me, because it makes me feel physically ill," she said.

'Language matters'

Valeriya asked herself whether the Ukrainian language could help Ukrainians defeat Russia and decided to look to history for an answer.

"My logical conclusion is this: all of history shows us that the Russian Soviet imperial authorities all started by destroying everything Ukrainian. They all started with the destruction of the language... The culture, actors, Ukrainian writers and politicians came later."

"And that means this really is paramount and that language matters," she said. "And that is probably why we should speak Ukrainian."

To sever all legal ties with the occupying country, Valeriya has submitted documents to renounce her Russian citizenship.

Ukraine is now not only her home but also the country where her son was born and where her daughter is growing up. She said she is raising them to be Ukrainians with Ukrainian traditions and language.