Ukraine: Russia bombs military targets throughout the country, the international community condemns an “aggression” – Le Monde

Russian and Ukrainian are very similar. These are two Slavic languages, written in Cyrillic characters (with a few letters for Ukrainian), phonetically close. However, despite this relationship, Russian and Ukrainian are very different languages ​​in terms of vocabulary, grammar, sentence construction and pronunciation. Unlike Russian, Ukrainian has notably many more words of Slavic origin.

In Ukraine, speaking Ukrainian is not easy. It has been the only official language of this former Soviet republic for more than thirty years, and yet, even today, it is Russian that dominates the public sphere in the big cities. In the restaurant, it happens to find a menu in Russian and English, but not in Ukrainian.

Ukrainian also suffers from its tormented history after decades of repression, terror and forced Russification under the Soviet Union. Between 1992 and 2018, the number of inhabitants who speak Ukrainian more often than Russian in everyday life has increased by only 9%, according to the Democratic Initiatives Fund of Ilko Koutcheriv, a renowned research center in Kyiv.

Faced with the Russian threat, the authorities now want to speed up the process. Since January 16, the service sector, the largest in the country, has been ordered to welcome customers in Ukrainian. It is one of the key components of the language law, passed in 2019 under former President Petro Poroshenko but applied in stages, which establishes the use of Ukrainian in all areas of public life.