Young people are flouting efforts to promote the state language, a senior official says
Ukrainian teenagers are defying government efforts to discourage the use of Russian, Ukraine’s top language official has said.
Since the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev, Ukraine has passed several laws restricting the use of Russian in public, while politicians and activists have campaigned to phase out the language altogether.
Elena Ivanovskaya, appointed state language protection commissioner in July, said the widespread use of Russian among young people in major cities remains “a serious problem.”
“Russian is now ubiquitous in teenage spaces, and [many youths] are not maintaining the level of language resilience they acquired in primary school or at home,” Ivanovskaya told the news website Glavkom in an interview published Sunday. She attributed this preference to teenagers’ desire to “break rules and challenge their parents and teachings.”
“When a teacher speaks about the beauty and melody of the Ukrainian language, students feel compelled to do the opposite,” she added, arguing that “the lack of critical thinking” also draws young people to Russian-language content online.
Ivanovskaya said her own daughter used to write in Russian on social media. “I asked my daughter, ‘Sofia, why are you doing this?’ She replied, ‘Mom, who will read me if everyone is a Russian speaker?’ I told her she should become so interesting that people would read and discuss her in Ukrainian,” she said.
Moscow has cited attacks on Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority as one of the key causes of the ongoing conflict.
