War and peace: Ukrainian and Russian in Ukraine

The closing years of the 20th century provided increasing evidence of how changes in the political and socio-economic structures influence or sometimes even determine linguistic structure and/or behaviour. For this purpose the linguistic situation in Ukraine and the position of Ukrainian and Russian are examined in the period since the independence of the country in 1991 when rapid shifts in political, economic and cultural spheres have made a significant impact on language planning.Language politics of post-Perestroika and post-Communist era in Ukraine has resulted in deliberate changes in both status and corpus planning leading to the elevation of Ukrainian as the only official (“state”) language and downgrading Russian which, however, remains functional in many regions of the country. The linguistic picture would be incomplete without analysis of a mixed Russian-Ukrainian variety Surzhyk, which is not something stable and permanent. It is undergoing significant changes in the present linguistic environment as it is becoming the oral and even written language not only of Ukrainophones but also of Russophones.