Reviewed by: Language Policy and the Discourse on Languages in Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych (25 February 2010–28 October 2012) by Michael Moser Volodymyr Kulyk (bio) Michael Moser, Language Policy and the Discourse on Languages in Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych (25 February 2010–28 October 2012) (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2013). 506pp. Bibliography. ISBN: 978-3-8382-0497-0. Unlike previous books by Austrian linguist Michael Moser, this one deals not with language per se but with policies regarding language. It examines words and deeds of Ukrainian politicians and officials allied with President Victor Yanukovych in one of the most controversial domains of his regime's activities, namely, the elevation of the legal status of the Russian language and expansion of its use in various public practices. Moser's detailed account deals with a specific period indicated in the title of the book: from Yanukovych's assumption of the presidential office in February 2010 to the parliamentary election of October 2012, which the president and his allies arguably had in mind when choosing their strategy in language policy. Simply put, the book is about how the new regime passed a law shifting the balance of Ukraine's language policies toward the greater role of Russian. Prior to an examination of specific policies of the Yanukovych period, Chapter 1 presents a background [End Page 485] description of the Ukrainian sociolinguistic situation, that is, the use of various languages in various domains and citizens' language attitudes and policy preferences. The author correctly notes that the most frequently used data on the linguistic composition of society, namely, the census returns on "native language," do not in the Ukrainian case indicate actual language use since millions of people speak Russian but consider themselves Ukrainian and, accordingly, declare Ukrainian their ridna mova (or rodnoi iazyk, since many such declarations are made in Russian). A legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy, this discrepancy between ethnocultural identity and language practice persists in independent Ukraine whose policies encourage citizens to identify with the titular nation and, by extension, its eponymous language but do not force or, indeed, help them use that language in everyday life. In contrast to some Ukrainian and Western scholars, Moser does not discard native-language data as irrelevant in view of their incongruence with actual language use but points out that legal statuses based on the former kind of data should be corrected in view of the latter. That is, given its wide spread in many regions and social domains, often to the point of the marginalization of Ukrainian, Russian should not be treated as a minority language. In fact, this is exactly what proponents of the elevation of its status call for but, Moser argues, they suggest an inadequate way of correcting the inadequate legal situation, namely, by granting Russian status as one of the so-called regional languages, allegedly in accordance with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This Charter and its applicability to Ukraine is the topic of Chapter 2. Moser believes that Russian in Ukraine should not be protected by the Charter which primarily aims at preventing further marginalization and eventual extinction of lesser-used languages. Given its widespread use in Ukrainian society, Russian is anything but marginal and thus, Moser concludes, in no need of protection by the Charter or, indeed, any other legal instrument. It is certainly reasonable to question the appropriateness of the diversity-oriented Charter to a language whose prevalence contributes to further marginalization of other languages. However, a no less legitimate question is whether the state should look for other legal means of overcoming an obvious discrepancy between the social functions of Russian and its legal status, all the more so because this discrepancy means a limitation of legitimate uses of the language and, therefore, of its speakers' recognized rights. This question, however, is not raised in the book. Strongly convinced [End Page 486] that "the Russian language has never been under threat in Ukraine, but on the contrary tends to threaten the vitality of the Ukrainian language as well as other languages of Ukraine" (P. 36), Moser proceeds in the following chapters to a critical examination of statements and actions of...
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Volodymyr Kulyk (2013) studied this question.