Ukrainian Is My Native Language, but I Had to Learn It

Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home. Back then, in that part of the country, Ukrainian was reserved for formal settings: schools, banks, and celebrations, often infused with a performative flare of ethnic pride. Russian dominated the mundane and the intimate: gossiping with friends during recess, writing in a journal, arguing with parents. I straddled both languages with my grandmother, who spoke surzhyk, a colloquial mix of the two.

I spoke Russian not because I had any particular connection to it, but because it was an easy default. For 400 years, Russian had seeped into Ukrainian life and across Ukrainian territory: In the process of colonizing the south of Ukraine, the Russian empire called the area the “New Russia,” imposing the language of the metropole on the Ukrainian-speaking population. During the 19th century, Russians, as well as members of other ethnic minorities, populated newly industrialized towns in the Donbas region to work in factories and mines while rural areas remained largely Ukrainian-speaking. As peasants flocked to the cities, Russian became the language of status and social mobility.

From the June 2022 issue: Ukraine and the words that lead to mass murder

But when Russia launched an all-out war not only on Ukrainian territory, but also on its independent identity and culture, passive acceptance of the linguistic status quo came to feel like a moral failure. A language once used neutrally as a tool for communication now evoked terror, centuries-long erasure, and oppression. Russian had become the language of filtration camps and interrogations, and speaking it felt like relinquishing one small means to resist.

Self-assertion through language was not a new concept for Ukrainians. The country’s independence in 1991 had come with the promise of a collective return to the Ukrainian language. But the transition didn’t really gain momentum until the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s invasion of the Donbas that spring. A 2019 language law established Ukrainian as the state language, requiring it in more than 30 areas of public life, including media and education. Then came the full-scale war in 2022. With Russian imperialism on full display, reviving Ukrainian became a kind of national project: People deliberately committed to speaking their native language, regardless of how well they’d known it or spoken it before.

In a survey conducted some eight months after the full-scale invasion, 71 percent of Ukrainians said they’d started speaking Ukrainian more; a poll from January 2023 indicated that 33 percent of Kyiv’s residents had switched to Ukrainian. All businesses registered in Ukraine are required by law to make Ukrainian the language of their landing pages. As of April, to become a Ukrainian citizen, you need to pass an exam that includes a written component in Ukrainian as well as a 10-minute monologue based on a prompt, in addition to a section on Ukraine’s constitution and history.

“We’re undergoing a kind of rebirth of the language. We’re only beginning to discover what’s always been ours,” Volodymyr Dibrova, a writer and translator who teaches Ukrainian at Harvard, told me. Not religion or territory, but language, Dibrova said, turned out to be the ethno-consolidating factor for Ukrainians—the main external element that differentiated us from the enemy. “It’s as if people have woken up and are asking: Who are we? What does our real history look like? What is our language?”

For me and other predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians, the new language context meant wrestling with a kind of cultural dissonance: If Ukrainian was our language, why didn’t we speak it all the time? Why wasn’t it the language of our relationships and of all occasions—formal address but also chitchat, marital fights, grieving?

This question occupied my mind as I began shifting into Ukrainian with previously Russian-speaking friends. I’d lived in the United States for 20 years, and Russian remained the language of my Ukrainian friendships. One friend, originally from Donetsk, from whom I’d not heard a word of Ukrainian in our 25 years of friendship, caught me off guard when she answered my call in Ukrainian to give me parking instructions when I visited her in Pennsylvania.

“You switched to Ukrainian?” I said, buying time to assess how this shift might change our closeness and connection. Throughout our visit, I fumbled through getting my points across in Ukrainian; my thoughts felt flat and my vocabulary lackluster. My mind raced to find the right word in Ukrainian, and I often slipped into a pathetic mix of Russian and English words. I was proud of us both, yet each conversation felt exhausting. With my parents, who live in Kyiv, shifting to Ukrainian still feels new and uncomfortable, a strain on dynamics already complicated by the war and living on different continents.

I know of even more complicated linguistic relationships. Oleksandra Burlakova, a digital-content creator and video blogger in Kyiv, grew up in a Russian-speaking family in the eastern city of Lysychansk. She completely shifted to Ukrainian in 2021 to solidify her national identity, but her husband wasn’t ready to make the change until February 24, 2022, the day the Russian invasion began. For nearly a year, the couple spoke two different languages.

“You fall in love with the whole person, including their language, and then it changes,” she told me. “It was very unusual.”

Burlakova recalled how hard it was at first to match the right Ukrainian words to her emotions. “I’d seen people fighting in Ukrainian on TV, but I’d never seen it in real life,” she said. But after immersing herself in Ukrainian books, movies, and music, she was able to begin aligning her verbal expression with her inner experience. “I felt like a whole person again.”

The Ukrainian language activist and TikToker Danylo Haidamakha made a complete switch to Ukrainian as a teenager and aptly describes how scary the plunge can be. “For me, the language switch—it’s like swimming off one shore, not knowing if you’re going to make it across to the other shore,” he said in an interview last year.

To me, making that departure felt like exposing a vulnerable, unexamined part of who I was. I saw how steeped my consciousness had been in the narratives of Russification, which for centuries convinced Ukrainians that their language was somehow unrefined and inferior to Russian. In the 19th century, the Russian empire banned Ukrainian-language literature and art, excluding it from public life. During Stalin’s rule, even the particularities of Ukrainian phonetics—the language’s suffixes and endings—were viewed as a threat, and Ukrainian words were twisted to sound more Russian or eliminated from the dictionary to make the two languages seem more alike.

Read: What Ukrainian literature has always understood about Russia

Along with wiping out millions of Ukrainian lives during the artificial famine of the 1930s, the Stalinist regime deprived the surviving Ukrainians of the ability to think or speak, Christina Pikhmanets, a Ukrainian linguist and educational and cultural adviser at Sesame Workshop, told me. “Language is the center of decision making,” she said. “Around the language, we form the social and cultural understanding of who we are.” Pikhmanets is currently helping translate Sesame Street into Ukrainian, and in doing so she tries to avoid words borrowed from Russian or English.

Studying one’s native language seems like a contradiction in terms. But many Ukrainians need to “activate” their linguistic inheritance, Burlakova believes. Ukrainian conversation clubs and online schools have sprouted to help with that. TikTok and Instagram brim with young Ukrainians unearthing the richness of the language.

One of the more astounding finds on Ukrainian-language TikTok is a post suggesting nearly 30 Ukrainian synonyms for the word vagina. Another post lists Ukrainian words for rare colors such as periwinkle, cinderblock, and wheat. The latter is the work of Anna Finyk, who has more than 20,000 followers, and who told me she grew up speaking surzhyk, the informal hodgepodge of two languages my grandmother spoke.

As a university student, Finyk began refining her speech to eradicate Russified words. After the February 2022 invasion, she wanted to help others do the same. “My mission is to help people improve their language without any pressure,” she told me. In her playful posts, she excavates old Ukrainian words and synonyms, exposes mispronounced words, and pretends to be a translation service spewing authentic Ukrainian equivalents for such words and phrases as the wine is fermenting, exploitation, and quicksilver.

The war has given birth to a slew of new idioms and expressions in Ukrainian. Together with her colleagues, Alla Kishchenko, a philologist and lecturer in applied linguistics at Odesa Mechnikov National University, has been collecting new phrases tied to specific moments of the war. My favorite on the list is zatrydni, or “in three days,” a reference to Russia’s failed plan to conquer Kyiv in three days, which now refers to a person making unrealistic plans. Makronyty uses the name of French President Emmanuel Macron to describe a public appearance that does not correspond to substantive action. “These expressions are built on irony, sarcasm, and satire,” Kishchenko told me. “This contemporary folklore helps us feel a kind of unity.”

Collective language-making offers some playfulness amid the onslaught of Russian atrocities. On the website Slovotvir, where people can suggest and vote for new Ukrainian words to replace borrowed English words such as deadline, screenshot, and puzzle, the proposed word for tablet is a Ukrainian word roughly translated as “swiper”; the highest-voted equivalent for the @ symbol, previously denoted by the Russian word for dog, is now the Ukrainian word for snail. Ukrainian equivalents for hashtag and like are already widely used in speech.

The voting website makes clear that its creators’ goal is not to force the usage of new words, but to give people options. And replacing foreign words that have crept into the Ukrainian language with authentically Ukrainian equivalents is not possible in every instance. You’d need a full sentence to describe the concept of “catering” in Ukrainian, for example. Still, Pikhmanets, of Sesame Street, endorses the effort: “If we borrow the word, we borrow the context and the culture,” she told me.

Today’s work is a bit like putting together a puzzle, uncovering the shape of a language subjected to centuries of suppression. Throughout those centuries, Ukrainian survived in rural communities and in the country’s west, developing a diversity of quirks and dialects. But Russification policies shut down any effort to standardize the literary language and precluded its proliferation and modernization. A literary ideal of the language will eventually come into balance with the messiness of colloquial speech, according to Pikhmanets: “Language is a living organism, and it’s supposed to evolve and change,” she said.

Put another way, strengthening the Ukrainian language at its core will be the simultaneous work of literature, music, art, and everyday speech—“the collective commitment and persistent efforts of the entire society,” as Volodymyr Dibrova said.

For those of us just beginning to make Ukrainian our language of first resort, an atmosphere of inclusive effort is freeing. More proficient speakers and language experts almost encourage us to make mistakes. After all, perhaps the proper endings and suffixes are not the main point.

Mastery will arrive one day, I’m hopeful, but first will come the awkward pauses and sloppy turns of phrase. These imperfections, too, inhabit ideals that the Ukrainian language represents: freedom, resilience, and empathy.