The age factor in language practices and attitudes: continuity and change in Ukraine's bilingualism

Abstract

This article analyzes inter-cohort differences and intra-cohort changes in language proficiencies, use patterns and attitudes in a society undergoing a radical political and cultural transformation. My analysis focuses on Ukraine, a country with an asymmetrical bilingualism where the new independent state mildly promotes the titular language but the formerly dominant Russian maintains an active presence in most social domains and individual repertoires. While confirming earlier findings on the small scale of age differences, this study detects the end of the inter-cohort shift toward Russian. Another important finding is that the apparent continuity with a slow drift toward the titular language in Ukraine as a whole conceals two radically different developments in the two geographical “halves” of the country. The study demonstrates an advantage of combining a synchronic analysis of inter-cohort differences with a diachronic analysis of intra-cohort changes.

Keywords:

• language policy
• language ideologies
• media discourse
• ethnicity
• national identity
• Ukraine

Acknowledgements

The 2012 survey was funded by a grant awarded to me by the Shevchenko Scientific Society in America from the Natalia Danylchenko Endowment Fund. The 2006 survey was part of a collaborative project supported by the International Association for the promotion of co-operation with scientists from the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union (INTAS). Thanks are also due to the journal's editor and reviewers for their stimulating suggestions.

Notes

1. A cohort may be broadly defined as the

aggregate of individuals (within some population definition) who experienced the same event within the same time interval. In almost all cohort research to date the defining event has been birth, but this is only a special case of the more general approach. (Ryder 1965, 845)

The term “generation” is thereby reserved for the context of kinship, although some authors use the two words alternately.

2. It should be noted, however, that the increasing discrepancy between ethnic identity and language practice in the late Soviet decades resulted not only from the progressive Russification of practice but also from the predominant retention of Ukrainian identity. This discrepancy persisted and even widened in independent Ukraine (Kulyk 2011, 2014).

3. Driven by purely analytical considerations, the cutoffs of the cohorts do not indicate any inherent differences between people of almost the same age who come to be placed in different cohorts. Small changes in the cutoffs would leave most results intact, although due to the somewhat uneven age distribution of the sample some of the significant differences might become insignificant and vice versa. Should the delineation of the cohorts considerably change their average size, the significance of differences between them would of course change accordingly.

4. Contrary to suggestions by some scholars of the age effect, I do not standardize the cohorts by the level of education since most members of the youngest cohort are still too young to have achieved the highest level, so the standardization would drastically change the figures for this cohort. Apart from this effect, the cohorts that completed their education in post-Soviet Ukraine do not manifest any major educational differences from each other, while being clearly distinct from older cohorts whose educational opportunities were more limited.

5. In principle, it is also possible that the difference in the self-assessed proficiency reflects, at least in part, greater willingness of young people than older ones to declare good knowledge of Ukrainian which, in turn, may have to do with the youth's stronger belief that such knowledge is appropriate for Ukrainian citizens. This effect would then be noticeable precisely in the pro-Orange regions where the loyalty to the perceived national language arguably increases with time due to the impacts of education, mass culture, and other domains. Being less loyal, the youth of the anti-Orange regions would be less inclined to exaggerate their proficiency. Similar bias in favor of Ukrainian in the west and center may also have affected responses on language use. It is unlikely, however, that such bias can primarily account for the significant inter-cohort differences which are, moreover, not consistent across the survey questions.

6. At least this is the case for spoken language, which is what most people seemed to primarily assess when answering the question on their level of knowledge. At the same time, the increasing use of the Internet, particularly the interaction in social networks contributes to proficiency in written language among the young people, primarily with regard to Russian which most Ukrainians use online (Kulyk 2013b). As Internet fora and social networks demonstrate, high proficiency does not necessarily mean correct spelling.

7. Several months after the survey, the local official status of Russian and other languages of major groups was stipulated in the new language law, except that the criterion was to be the census-proven fact of a certain share (at least 10%) of the speakers of the respective language in the local population rather than the preference – however articulated – of its majority (Charnysh 2013).

8. This finding confirms the conclusion based on the 2006 data that among the Russian-speakers, young people are more supportive than the older ones of the spread of Ukrainian in society, even if this support does not translate into their own use of the language (Kulyk 2007).

9. At the same time, the increase of reported proficiency among elderly west-central and rural respondents few of whom used the Internet or had any other new experiences of communicating in Russian raises the question of whether the increase has primarily to do with a change in people's perception of their actual and appropriate qualities. However, it is doubtful that such perceptional change would only affect the responses on proficiencies and not on preferences regarding the language situation and policy where the intra-cohort changes are actually much smaller (see below).