Search for Ukrainian on education platform increases 485% after war starts

The global commotion that the war in Ukraine unleashed has spilled over into culture in recent days: while restaurants stop serving Russian dishes and change names of drinks that make reference to the country, Ukrainian culture is the subject of growing interest.

Part of this movement is reflected in the increase in Ukrainian learners on one of the world’s largest language teaching platforms, Duolingo. The language app has seen worldwide interest in the language grow by 485%. In Brazil, Ukrainian went from the 31st most sought-after language to occupy the 14th position in the ranking after the beginning of the war.

Student Clara Sautchuk, 21, and her brother Gabriel, 14, looked up the language on the platform just days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February. Great-great-grandchildren of a Ukrainian, the brothers say that the identity with the nation has not remained in the family over the years.

“We never dedicated ourselves to learning the language, knowing the culture or anything like that, despite being something so close to our family. With the war, it was a shock. I have a surname in that language that I don’t know”, says Clara. .

As she is already investing in German and Ukrainian courses are more difficult to find, she looked for the app. She called her brother and, together, they have already learned basic words, such as “mother”, and are taking their first lessons in the Cyrillic alphabet – the same used in Russian.

Understanding it has been a challenge, according to them, as has learning pronunciation. “It’s very different. Some things in German, for example, are similar to English, so you can understand the general”, says Gabriel. In the case of the Ukrainian, he says, there are no references.

Ukrainian belongs to the family of Slavic languages, such as Belarusian and Russian. They began to differentiate from the 10th century onwards, according to Yuri Shevchuk, professor in the department of Slavic languages ​​at Columbia University. “Russian and Ukrainian are not very close languages. There are similarities, but they can be superficial,” he explains.

Still, most Ukrainians understand Russian — a one-way street, since, according to Shevchuk, this is because they are more exposed to the language of power.

“The fact that there are certain similarities between Ukrainian and Russian has often been used by Russian imperial propaganda as an argument that the Ukrainian language is not really a language but a ‘Southwest Russian dialect’. no linguistic basis”, says the researcher.

The use of the Russian language as a tool for dominance, says Shevchuk, dates back to Tsarism, a system that lasted in Russia until the beginning of the 20th century. “The history of Russian-Ukrainian language relations has more than 150 different ways of banning the public use of the Ukrainian language.”

The winds had been changing after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s and the breakup of the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a part. “The younger generation of eastern Ukrainians [atualmente separatista] is becoming Ukrainian-speaking because of the growing number of schools, publications, universities and cultural content in the language.”

In the war, the linguistic question came back to the fore. Russian President Vladimir Putin claims to be protecting Ukraine’s Russian speakers, who are said to be suffering oppression in the neighboring country.

In addition to discovering the language, last week Clara and her brother also began to explore the region’s cuisine and made a babka, a sweet bread typical of Eastern Europe and Jewish communities.

The war, she says, mixed up various parts of her life.

“I’m a museology student. I was following the news of museums, of monuments in Ukrainian cities being destroyed and this gave me a very heavy feeling. They are erasing the memory of these people”, he says.

“It crossed my mind, as a museologist, to maybe get into projects or create something to restore the country’s memory and heritage. It’s a big thought, but as it’s something in my area, it would be very interesting”, he concludes.