After Ju. Shevelov’s works and others, the history of the repression of the Ukrainan language is well known. In the Soviet part of Ukraine during the 1930s, especialy, the norms of the Ukrainian language have been changed in order to erase the « bourgeois influences », that is to say either Polish or too specifical local non-Russian words, expressions, grammatical constructions, etc. This extremely important question has been thoroughly studied by specialists in history and political sciences. Linguists themselves have carefully described all those changes and their consequences for the speakers and for the prestige of Ukrainian.

My aim here is different. I propose to analyse the implicit model of what a language must be in order to be changed out of political considerations. All linguists have learnt in F. de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) that the mass of speakers is but « passive » in front of their language and that it is impossible to change it by simple decision. Nonetheless, the language situation in Ukraine seems to prove exactly the contrary : a decision from outside can change a language.

I think those two ways of thought are not as incompatible as they seem to be. The problem is that their object of knowledge is not the same. For Saussure, language is a construct inside a theory, it is not an empirical object, whereas for the political language reformers in Ukraine what is at stake is another object, whose name is ridna mova in Ukrainian and rodnoj jazyk in Russian. These terms are so strange for Western scholars that they are almost unstranlatable. They do not mean « mother tongue », because ridna mova is a matter of education : some school teachers in Ukraine ask their pupils to « teach it to their parents ». In English it is often translated as « native language ». But a Ukrainian PhD student told me « my ridna mova is Ukrainian, but I dont speak it : at home we speak only Russian ». The problem is still worsened by the fact that at times what is at stake is literaturna mova/literaturnyj jazyk : not the language of Belles lettres, but the normative language which has been elaborated by linguists on the basis of the writers of a specific region and of a specific period. In this case it can be a synonym of national langage, or official language, but it is not sure that anybody totally follows its rules in everyday conversation.

The Ukrainian situation is also complicated by the fact that before WW2 a large part of the Western Ukrainian territories were situated in other States, with different attitudes and legislations toward the Ukrainian language, with the effect that the standard presented some important differences with the standard in the Soviet Ukraine.

I will study the discourse on language of the language discussion in Ukraine in the inter-war period, which is not less important than the questione della lingua in Italy for the construction of the State.

But a comparison is necessary with two neighboring countries which at the same time underwent similar political experiments on language : Bielorussia and Moldavia. 

The histories of those three situations are parallel : a first period of nativization (korenizacija) in the 1920s is followed by a period of arests of linguists, accused of « sabotage » in the 1930s, for having invented norms « alien from the Russian proletariat ».

But any comparison reveals also differences. In Bielorussia, a first norm had been created in 1918 : the « tarasˇkevica », which was defeated in the middle of the 1930s by another one, more conform to the Russian usage: the « narkomouka ». In both cases long lists of forbidden words were published, to be replaced by words which ressembled Russian ones.

In Moldavia the situation was slightly different, because the discourse was victim of a double bind : the Moldavian language had to be distinguished from Rumanian, which was too « bourgeois » because of its French, Italian and Latin loan-words, « ununderstandable » by the people. But the strange neologisms which were created during the period of the « nativization » were still more ununderstandable and could not be accepted by the intelligentsia. Here we are confrontated with the hard dilemma of Romantic linguistics which has perdured since the time of Fichte and Humboldt : the literary national language is supposed to be the reflection of the « soul of the people » (the national poets have to « learn with the people », but the people is not supposed to speak a « popular » coarse language, so it has to be taught the new language of the intelligentsia, which in its turn does not correspond to the usage of the people, etc. The circle is vicious, and the Soviet language politics in the interwar period is taken in a trap with contradictions inherited from the Romantic period.

The repression of the Ukrainian language is not only a matter of stalinist politics : some great Russian linguists in the emigration like R. Jakobson and N. Trubetzkoy had extremely disparaging judgments towards the mere existence Ukrainian as a separate language from Russian.

Finally, a special point will be made on the nationality/citizenship opposition, which is often an obstacle for mutual understanding in East-West intellectual relationship in Europe.

But the main point is that in all those discussions the adersaries share the same set of values : for the local nationalists as well as for the « great-power chauvinists » the language is supposed to be the reflection of the soul of the people but at the same time it has to be taught to the people.

 

Short bibliography (some of those texts can be found on our web site : http://crecleco.seriot.ch/textes/index.html)

- DOROŠENKO D.I. : « K ‘ukrainskoj probleme’ (po povodu stat’i kn. N. S. Trubeckogo)», Evraziiskaia khronika, n° 10, 1928, p. 41-51.

- FILIN F.P. : Proisxoždenie russkogo, ukrainskogo i belorusskogo jazykov, Moscow, 1972.

- KAGANOVIČ S.K. : “Bor’ba s velikoderžavnym šovinizmom i mestnym nacionalizmom v oblasti jazykovedenija”, Literatura i iskusstvo, n° 4, 1931, p. 88-95.

- MAGOCSI Paul Robert : The shaping of national identity : Subcarpathian Rus' : 1848-1948, Cambridge (Mass); London : Harvard Univ. Press, 1978.

- KING Charles : “The Ambivalence of Authenticity, or  How the Moldovan Language Was Made”, Slavic Review, n° 1, 1999, p. 117-142.

- MARR N. Ja: : “Problema pis’ma trekh slavianskikh alfavitov jazykov SSSR — belorusskogo, ukrainskogo i russkogo”, Jazyk i myšlenie, n° 3-4, 1935, p. 7-11.

- SHEVELOV G. : The Ukrainian Language in the first Half of the XXth Century, Harvard Univ. Press, 1898

- TRUBECKOJ N.S. : “K ukrainskoj probleme”, Evrazijskij vremennik, 5, 1927, p. 165-184.

- Paul Wexler : «Belorussification, Russification and Polonization Trends in the Belorussian Language 1890-1982», in Isabelle Kreindler (ed.) : Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet National Languages. Their Past, Present and Future, Berlin – NY – Amst : Mouton de Gruyter, 1985, p. 37-56.