SOURCE. Dominique Arel,
"Interpreting 'Nationality' and 'Language' in the 2001 Ukrainian Census,"
Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 18 No. 3, July-September 2002, pp. 213-249.
In December 2001 Ukraine conducted its first post-Soviet census. Together
with anthropologists Greta Uehling and Jennifer Dickinson, Dominique Arel
(Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Providence,
Rhode Island, USA) researched the background to the census and observed
its conduct. His article focuses on the political agendas underlying the
formulation and administration of the census questions on "nationality"
and "language." Here I concentrate on how the census bears upon the status
of the Russian language in Ukraine. (1)
Like preceding Soviet censuses, the Ukrainian census asks people not
what language they prefer to speak or actually do speak most of the time
but what is their "native language." (2) While the census instructions
provide no clear definition of this term, it is widely understood to mean
the language of one's forebears. Many ethnic Ukrainians who usually speak
Russian in everyday life nonetheless consider Ukrainian their native language.
As the author was surprised to discover, even some ethnic Ukrainians whose
mother tongue -- the language first spoken in childhood is Russian record
their native language as Ukrainian. "Language," he concludes, "is who you
are, not what you speak."
Thus in the 1989 Soviet census 12 percent of ethnic Ukrainians gave
Russian as their native language, although sociological surveys show about
35 percent of ethnic Ukrainians preferring to speak Russian at home. When
other ethnic groups are factored into the calculation, it turns out that
roughly half of Ukraine's population is Russian-speaking. Official recognition
of this fact would make it hard to deny Russian equal status with Ukrainian
as a state language. To justify the status of Ukrainian as sole state language
it is better to focus attention on the fact that nearly two-thirds of the
population -- a constitutional majority -- consider Ukrainian their native
language.
Ukrainian nationalists tend not only to understate but also to de-legitimize
the whole phenomenon of Russian language preference among ethnic Ukrainians,
making language rights dependent simply upon the distribution of the population
by "nationality," meaning ethnic origin. The false
assumption of one-to-one correspondence between language and ethnicity,
inherited from early Soviet practice, is built into European legal norms
too. Thus the Framework Convention for the Protection of National
Minorities (2001), to which Ukraine as a member of the Council of Europe
is a party, and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
(2001), which Ukraine is expected to ratify, link the legal obligation
to implement minority language rights to "areas inhabited by persons belonging
to national minorities traditionally or in substantial numbers."
What constitutes "substantial numbers"? This is left to the discretion
of states. The Ukrainian parliament initially fixed the threshold at 20
percent, thereby securing the rights of the 22-percent Romanian minority
in Chernivtsy region, as required by the terms of an agreement with Romania.
(3) However, the Constitutional Court overturned the law in question on
dubious procedural grounds, and a new draft law currently before parliament
raises the threshold to 50 percent.
The practical implications of the change for Russian language rights (as
well as language rights of other minorities) are enormous. "A 20 percent
threshold would give language rights to Russians just about anywhere in
Eastern Ukraine -- half of the country. A 50 percent threshold would limit
[such rights] to Crimea, and even there Russian activists are nervous about
the future of their ethnic majority." (4)
NOTES
(1) Professor Arel discusses several other issues affecting
not only Russians but also smaller minorities. He pays special attention
to the sensitive issue of the Rusyns in Transcarpathia.
(2) "Rodnoi iazyk" in Russian, "ridna mova" in Ukrainian.
(3) By the terms of the agreement with Romania, Ukraine
guaranteed the rights of Romanians in Ukraine and Romania guaranteed the
rights of Ukrainians in Romania. Ukraine's Romanian minority is concentrated
in the Chernivtsy region in the southwest of the country. According to
the 1989 census, Romanians and Moldovans (the two groups are counted together
in this context as they speak the same language)
constitute 22 percent of the population of this region -- just over the
20 percent threshold.
(4) The 1989 census showed ethnic Russians as constituting
67 percent of the population in Crimea. However, the figure must have fallen
considerably since then as a result of the return of Crimean Tatars. "It
could diminish further because of out-migration to Russia, or if a greater
proportion of children of ethnically mixed marriages identify as Ukrainians."