Language Ideology and Language Planning in Wartime Ukraine: Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities
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Date
2025
Authors
Azhniuk, Bohdan
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Abstract
Background. War as a specific social context has a powerful influence on the linguistic consciousness and linguistic behavior of Ukrainians, affecting their cognitive activity and the resources of nominative means of the Ukrainian language. Over the period of nearly three decades since Ukrainian independence, considerable attention was paid in discussions on language policy to finding compromise solutions for granting Russian some official status. After February 24, 2022, the issue of giving the Russian language any status disappeared from the public agenda. The war has not only strengthened Ukrainian as a marker of the country’s national identity, but it also deeply influenced Ukrainians’ perceptions of the "us vs. them" opposition, and many Ukrainians who had previously communicated mainly in Russian switched to Ukrainian in an attempt to emphasize their Ukrainian national identity. Contribution to the research field. The Ukrainian language, as a symbolic marker of the nation, is associated not only with the national ethnographic heritage, but also with a certain type of political culture that distinguishes Ukraine from Russia. This finding has important implications for predicting the effects of the current language policy and for developing a language ideology that reflects not only perceptions of the current state of the language but also what it should be or what it should become in the future. Purpose. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to explore how beliefs about language mediate the relationship between language use and social organization in the circumstances of Russian military aggression against Ukraine, and (2) to provide an assessment of the current state and future prospects of language planning in Ukraine, particularly regarding ideological interaction among the major agents of language policy. Methods. The article applies the participant-observation method, the critical discourse analysis method, the content analysis method, and language policy documentation analysis. Results. In postcolonial societies, language ideologies are constantly constructed and re-constructed in discursive interactions at the micro and macro levels. The role of language ideology as a regulator of language behavior is particularly significant at the grassroots level, where the influence of official norms and regulations does not reach or is very weak. This allows language ideologies to perform social work. Discussion. Ideological consensus and practical cooperation among the state authorities, the mass media, the academic community, and the representatives of civil society have greatly contributed to the replacement of the assimilationist ideology of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism with the "one nation, one language" ideology. The Ukrainian language is increasingly becoming a supraethnic as a means of communication not only for the Ukrainian ethnic group but also for a wide range of citizens of different nationalities.
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Keywords
language ideology, monolingualism, bilingualism, language planning, linguistic diversity, linguistic decolonization, article
Citation
Azhniuk B. Language Ideology and Language Planning in Wartime Ukraine: Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities / Bohdan Azhniuk // Мова: класичне - модерне - постмодерне. - 2025. - Вип. 11 (спеціальний випуск). - С. 50-66. - https://doi.org/10.18523/lcmp2522-9281.2025.11.50-66