Educational Language Policies in contemporary Ukraine: debates and discourses

Abstract

Ukraine is a state with more than 100 ethnicities and nationalities that speak various languages. Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine based on its Constitution and other legislative acts. Language has been a topic of political debate since the Ukrainian independence. Previously it has been centered around the status of the Russian language which is the second most spoken language in Ukraine. It had been so until 2017, when representatives of other minority languages got involved in the public debate over languages after the new Law “On Education” was passed. The current study focuses on analyzing the recent debate on education language policy in Ukraine. Through textually based discourse analysis the study examines ideological framings of policy texts. It demonstrates that the current education language policy is political in nature aimed to promote nation-state power through “one nation, one language” ideology. The study also touches upon how social actors of the debate are represented in the media. Lexico-grammatical analysis of newspaper headlines shows partiality and biases in depictions of the events. The paper concludes that Ukrainian government justifies current language policy in school by aspirations to bring social cohesion to fragmented Ukrainian society. However, such policy limits the linguistic rights of other national minorities.