Why am I Learning Ukrainian?

Beyond just "Слава Україні" (Slava Ukraini)

I’m currently running with a 521 day streak on Duolingo.

Mostly I’m learning French, because I have French-speaking relatives and it helps me go visit them, and talk to their children, and understand what’s going on when they’re not directly talking to me, and, even more importantly: because I grew up with my aunt Sylvie Anne, whom I loved, and who was like a second mother to me. She was French, and she was taken from us too soon. And every time I speak French, I feel her with me. I’m trying hard to pronounce “trottoir” (sidewalk), and she’s with me, patiently laughing with me, glad I’m trying.

It’s really no mystery why I’m practicing speaking French. I have every reason to practice speaking French. It is my heart, it is my family. It is who I am and who I care about. It is my future and my past.

The only mystery is why, some time last year, I started learning Ukrainian.

According to Duolingo (which I think is the world’s most widely-used language app, but in any case it’s the one I use), Ukrainian language learning increased by over 500% last year, after the Russian invasion. Most of that increase was in Europe, especially Poland, where Ukrainians had come to find refuge from war.

Last April, I helped put together an event at my university called “Ukrainian Voices,” which included one Ukrainian faculty member, two young women, one whose university was in Mariupol and one whose home was in Bucha, and a Ukrainian woman from Kharkiv who my friend Steve from grad school was lucky enough to meet and marry when he was living over there teaching English — all of them came to us via Zoom from locations in the US. The entire event was held in English.

Many Ukrainians speak English, especially Ukrainians who have traveled abroad. In Ukraine, everyone knows how to speak Russian, whether as a first or second language. Kharkiv is on the Russian border, it is a Russian-speaking region. Ukrainian is more likely spoken in the far East of the country, nearer to Poland and Moldova.

But what do you do when the lingua-franca of your region is also the native language of the people who have invaded your country and are raping and killing and destroying everything you know and love? Maybe you reject the “useful” language of the invaders and embrace the language that sets you uniquely apart, the language that the invaders want to scrub from history.

In helping moderate that event, I realized that I couldn’t confidently pronounce the names of Ukrainian cities, or even the name of my friend Steve’s wife, Olga, who I also consider a friend. Olga is one of the most common women’s names in Ukraine, but now you’re more likely to see it written as Olha, in hopes you won’t pronounce it as badly. The true pronunciation is somewhere between an American’s G and H.

Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which can be confusing if you’ve grown up on the Roman alphabet, because some of the letters look like familiar letters but sound differently, for example, there is a letter in Ukrainian (and Russian) which looks to me like an H but sounds to me like an N. Completely new letters are relatively easy to learn. Unlearning reflexive letter-sound associations is tougher. Most difficult of all are the sounds that just don’t exist in English.

Forcing myself to speak Ukrainian, I discovered, also improved my French. There are simply more sounds, more subtleties, in Ukrainian, and my “human language organ” (what some linguists might call lips, tongue, teeth, palate, throat, vocal chords) became more versatile. Ukrainian is like a backflip, French like a cartwheel; if you can half-ass backflip, a cartwheel is a breeze.

Ukrainian is a member of the Indo-European language family — the vast family of languages that evolved from a single language in distant pre-history, which includes English, French, Russian, Persian, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Hebrew, Latin, Czech, German, and many, many more.

Ukrainian just happens to be the strain of Indo-European that is spoken on the hills and fields where that pre-historical single language, the mother of all these other languages, emerged.

So that’s neat, but why am I learning Ukrainian? Why am I learning a language that I will probably never “use” in any practical way? There is no real family connection: my European ancestors included Yiddish-speaking Odessan Jews who fled the era of pogroms, came to the US, and spent generations denying being Jewish at all. My European ancestors also include German-speaking Romanians who escaped nationalist purges through Poland and to the United States, where they never quite learned English, never quite fit in — they stayed foreign on a pig farm, raised kids and beheld grandkids who were alien and apart from them as “Americans.”

This American grew up during the Cold War, my mind, like everyone’s, always on the knife’s edge of nuclear annihilation. As Tom Nichols (a former professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College) recently asserted, in this is not your parents’ Cold War, we’re probably at the most dangerous point in history since 1983 — the year I turned eight, the year both WarGames and The Day After were released — because Russia has been exposed for being weaker than they pretended:

This conventional weakness is actually what makes them more dangerous, because they’re now continually being humiliated in the field. And a country that had gotten by by convincing people that they were a great conventional power, that they had a lot of conventional capability, they’re being revealed now as a hollow power. They can’t even defeat a country a third of their own size.

And so when they’re running out of options, you can understand at that point where Putin says, Well, the only way to scramble the deck and to get a do-over here is to use some small nuclear weapon in that area to kind of sober everybody up and shock them into coming to the table or giving me what I want.

Now, I think that would be incredibly stupid. And I think a lot of people around the world, including China and other countries, have told Putin that would be a really bad idea. But I think one thing we’ve learned from this war is that Putin is a really lousy strategist who takes dumb chances because he’s just not very competent.

And that comes back to the Cold War lesson—that you don’t worry about someone starting World War III as much as you worry about bumbling into World War III because of a bunch of really dumb decisions by people who thought they were doing something smart and didn’t understand that they were actually doing something really dangerous.

I think most of the world is feeling this strain. You could be oblivious to the war, of course, and still experience its effects, because food prices and energy prices have increased in response, and those things affect everything else. That’s not what I mean.

I mean we’re feeling this strain in the sense of being conscious of how close we are to the brink. Others have said, and it is true, that Ukrainians are not just fighting for their own country, they’re fighting for the entire world, because what happens there will determine what kind of world my kids grow up in… or if they do.

This is why you will see Ukrainian flags flying from the hôtel de ville (city hall) near my cousin’s apartment in Lyon, and from bedroom windows here in Iowa. It is a way of honoring Ukraine and its people. There are many more concrete ways of supporting them too: sending them money, arms, helping them fight for their homes.

One more small symbol of support for Ukraine, I think, is letting their language, which is shortlisted for extermination by the Russian occupiers, not just into your heart but into your mouth: Дякую, you picture yourself saying, thank you, to a country and a people who are on the front lines of the fight for the future of our world. I am with you, I am for you, I will not forget you, Дякую.