What does the Russian invasion of Ukraine have to do with language?

If you ask Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian governmental policies promoting the use of the Ukrainian language are evidence of the “genocide” of ethnic Russians in the Russian-speaking east, and thus provide part of the rationale for invasion.

Propaganda like that aside, something else links war to language: power.

Long before shots were fired, a power struggle has played out in the region around language – specifically, whether or not Ukrainian is a language. Neither professional linguists nor Ukrainians have any problem thinking of Ukrainian as a separate language – it’s probably about as different from Russian as Spanish is from Portuguese. Yet Russian nationalists long sought to classify it as a dialect of Russian.

Russia’s status as a power language

It turns out that classifying a given language variety as “a language” is less clear than you might think, and popular understandings of “language” versus “dialect” are usually based more on political criteria than linguistic ones. As sociolinguist Max Weinreich succinctly put it, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

Russian, the language of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, is one of the world’s handful of power languages. Alongside languages such as Mandarin, Spanish and English, Russian is deeply intertwined with global politics, business and pop culture.

Of Russian’s 260 million speakers, roughly 40% – 103 million – speak it as a second language, a sign that people see value in learning it. It’s a lingua franca across Central Asia and the Caucasus, and is widely spoken in the Baltics.

Read full story at The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/long-before-shots-were-fired-a-linguistic-power-struggle-was-playing-out-in-ukraine-178247

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