Linguistic Diversity in Kharkiv: Between “Pride” and “Profit,” Between the Local and the Global

Abstract

This paper explores the linguistic diversity of the city of Kharkiv, focusing on the language ideologies and practices of Russian-speaking Kharkivites in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian military conflict of 2014. This conflict polarized Ukrainian Russophones into competing ideological positions for or against Russia and gave fresh vigour to the long-existing linguistic debate in Ukraine, which was a result of the Russian government’s manipulations of the Ukrainian language situation. The political convictions of Russian-speaking Kharkivites affect their linguistic behaviour, motivating them to attempt to switch to Ukrainian, to advocate bi- or multilingualism, or to demonstratively use only Russian. A field study that I carried out in Kharkiv in the summer of 2018 examined correlations and discrepancies between Kharkivites’ linguistic ideologies and their real-life language practices, focusing on the interaction between two factors: the discourse of “pride” in speaking a particular language, which is anchored in a speaker’s interpretations of the role of language in a nation, and the discourse of “profit,” which is based on a speaker’s expectation of economic benefits related to mastering a certain language. The study results reveal the vacillations of this Russian-speaking community between support for the monolingual ideology of the nation-state and the globalizing concept of multilingualism, demonstrating an interplay between discourses of “pride” and “profit” and the influence of local and global forces.