Friday 29th of March 2024, 00:40 CET
Ukraine: Language charter causes stir
November 21, 2002
Kyiv Post

Written by Evgenia Mussuri
Posted by HW on March 28, 2024

President Leonid Kuchma’s decision to send the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages to parliament for ratification has re-ignited public debate over use of Russian and other languages.

Ukraine signed the charter during May 1996 and parliament ratified the document in 1999, however the nation’s Constitutional Court overturned parliament’s action on largely procedural grounds, leading some at the time to suspect that the court had been influenced by political considerations.

The charter provides for the wider use of minority languages in education, the courts, culture, the media and government. It requires the country to provide public school instruction in languages other than Ukrainian when the minority language is widely spoken in an area.

The charter also requires that persons who speak minority languages be provided with interpreters in court, that the government encourage regional media to use minority languages, and that local officials use the language of the region’s minority groups.

The latter provision is exactly what officials in several Ukrainian regions have been striving for. Crimea’s parliament and city councils in Kharkiv and Luhansk have repeatedly tried to make Russian an official language in their regions.

Refat Chubarov, a lawmaker and one of two Crimean Tartars in parliament, said the bickering about the status of the Russian language has overshadowed the charter’s importance to other ethnic minorities.

“Unfortunately when people talk about the charter, they have only the Ukrainian and Russian languages in mind,” he said. “The languages of the national minorities are forgotten.”

Chubarov said only 11 out of Crimea’s more than 2,000 schools use Crimean Tartar as the language of instruction, even though Crimean Tartars constitute one in 10 of the peninsula’s population. He said only six schools teach in Ukrainian, and the remainder in Russian.

He said he believes that ratifying the charter would help preserve minority languages in Ukraine, many of which are currently on the verge of extinction.

Josef Zissels, chairman of Vaad, a Jewish organization, said that the language issue isn’t a pressing matter for Ukraine’s Jews, since Hebrew isn’t widely spoken by the country’s Jewish community. Zissels said he believes that it would be easier for the charter to win ratification if Russian had been excluded and dealt with separately.

“Those who are against the charter are not against the Hungarian or the Crimean Tartar language,” he said. “They are against Russian. It is not a secret that once this discussion starts, Western Ukraine will see it as a threat to its independence.”

Lyubov Glot, the editor of Slovo Prosvity, a Ukrainian-language newspaper, said that it was Ukrainian, rather than Russian, that is threatened.

“Nothing threatens the Russian language here,” Glot said. “It is the Ukrainian language that needs protection.”

She said it was “immoral” to talk about other languages while Ukrainian is in poor condition after decades of suppression.

Valery Ivanov, the president of the Academy of Press, said he doubts that parliament will ratify the charter this time around.

“It is not the first time that the charter has been considered,” Ivanov said. “When the constitutional court threw out [the 1999 ratification action], it did so merely due to political considerations.”

Ivanov said that even if the charter were to be approved, the government wouldn’t likely enforce it. He called the charter’s ratification necessary, because it would prevent the government from taking extreme positions on the language issue.

“I remember a period when the government ordered television broadcasters to broadcast only in Ukrainian,” he said. “It is wrong, but how can you explain to an official that you cannot force people to speak a language?”

A survey by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and TNS Ukraine found that 50.5 percent of the population speaks Ukrainian at home, while 46.3 percent prefers Russian. Minority languages dominate in just 3.2 percent of homes.

The Razumkov Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Serhy Shengin said that Ukraine needed to ratify the charter if it wanted to bring its legislation closer to European standards.

“Ukraine needs unity now,” he said, “But this language issue splits the society in two.”

Shengin said that Ukrainian should remain the state language, and Russian should be considered the language of international communication.

“We have other problems here,” he said. “The government should ensure that the adult population, and not only children, can study Ukrainian. It is too bad when good professionals who do not know Ukrainian cannot get state jobs.”

Shengin said that the government should support special Ukrainian-language study courses that would be open to everyone.

“Before, we had total Russification,” he said. “Now, we face total Ukrainization.”
 
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