7 ms·

>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually

by fsckboy 3mo ago

>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it. your "adjustment" didn't propose what other Slavic language would outnumber Ukrainian to be 3rd behind Polish and Russian, so you didn't move the needle.

egorfine 3mo ago
[flagged]
- demetrius 3mo ago
  "Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.) These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once. But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them. So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.
  - egorfine 3mo ago
    Agree. Especially in Ukraine where the term "native speaker" has been politically charged to an insane level. I prefer mother tongue.
    - demetrius 3mo ago
      Oh come on, the term itself is political. It has always been political everywhere: same in Russia and Ukraine. You can't "politically charge" a term that has always been political. The concept of "native language" is 100% political, always. As for "mother tongue", it has the same problems and more. "Mother tongue" brings in an implicit idea of 'less prestigious ethnic language', "mother tongue" as opposed to "father tongue" (even in ex-USSR: e.g. you would say that Belarusian is "матчына мова", but you'd never say that Russian is someone's "матчына мова" even when speaking about ethnic Russians — because Russian carries higher prestige, so can't be "mother's" language) We should not try to replace "native language" with a different term, we should avoid it in serious discussions. Instead, we can speak of proficiency, parents passing language to children, the role of education, the ethnic language, the national language, etc. And if we do so, we see that there's nothing wrong or unusual about Ukrainian. If anything, it's huge languages like Russian or English that are unusual. They're different from 99% languages of the world. After all, bilinguals are more common than monolinguals. It's Russian that is a weird outlier, not Ukrainian.
  - tannenfreund87 3mo ago
    I grew up in southern Germany, speaking the local dialect. As a young adult, I thought I could speak accent free German. I couldn't have been more wrong. Many people in Hamburg and Berlin rightfully guessed that I'm from Bavaria. Closely related languages and dialects exist in a continuum ((Max Weinreich: "a language is a dialect with an army an a navy"). Many people in Ukraine spoke and speak "surzhyk", depending on the political climate, they could claim to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Then Russian and Ukrainian, together with Belarusian form a dialect continuum. You can easily understand you neighboring village, but it gets harder and harder, the further you are apart until there's very little mutual intelligibility.
    - vkazanov 3mo ago
      I grew up in the east of lithuania, mostly hearing polish and russian in my early years, and then also lithuanian to a smaller degree. I eventually managed to separate the languages proper but I clearly see how the languages are are not a discrete classification. Like, lithuanian polish and lithuanian russian are similar, but polish polish is further away phonetically. Lithuanian has weird phonetics but the underlying grammar is very close to slavic languages. English is much further away on the spectrum but why are sentence intonations (irony , question, etc) are still strangely compatible with languages from other branches of the language tree..? Conclusion: strict language separation is a political construct not a natural thing.
- fsckboy 3mo ago
  Original statements that led to this discussion >>Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian >This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it. The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does. Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers? Put up or shut up. Russia 143,500,000 Ukraine 45,490,000 Poland 38,530,000 Czechia 10,200,000 Belarus 9,498,700 Bulgaria 7,265,000 Serbia 7,164,000 Slovakia 5,414,000 Croatia 4,253,000 Bosnia and 3,829,000 Herzegovina Slovenia 2,060,000 Montenegro 621,383 The people here ranting about how heated the topic is seem to be the people who want the topic to be heated, I'm thinking Putin knob polishers. What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian? Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two: Ukrainian 32,577,468 67.53% Russian 14,273,670 29.59% wikipedia also says as of 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language 32 million Ukrainian as 1st language 6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language you see? nobody is heated up. And soon, the remaining Russian speakers will be able to learn Ukrainian in school making the problem go away completely.
  - egorfine 3mo ago
    > Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian Basically this but not exactly. Number are up for debate because none of the sane estimates put the count of Ukrainians at 45m. It's closer to 37m or even <30m if we discount those who left Ukraine. But yeah, the vast majority of urban population thinks in Russian. Also see an adjacent comment in this thread: if we sum up the predominantly ukrainian-speaking urban centers' population we get to a bit over 11m people which is basically the same figure as Czech language. Thus putting Ukrainian language to the second place even by conservative estimate. Which makes my original point incorrect.

by fsckboy 3mo ago

egorfine 3mo ago

[flagged]

demetrius 3mo ago
"Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.) These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once. But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them. So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.
- egorfine 3mo ago
  Agree. Especially in Ukraine where the term "native speaker" has been politically charged to an insane level. I prefer mother tongue.
  - demetrius 3mo ago
    Oh come on, the term itself is political. It has always been political everywhere: same in Russia and Ukraine. You can't "politically charge" a term that has always been political. The concept of "native language" is 100% political, always. As for "mother tongue", it has the same problems and more. "Mother tongue" brings in an implicit idea of 'less prestigious ethnic language', "mother tongue" as opposed to "father tongue" (even in ex-USSR: e.g. you would say that Belarusian is "матчына мова", but you'd never say that Russian is someone's "матчына мова" even when speaking about ethnic Russians — because Russian carries higher prestige, so can't be "mother's" language) We should not try to replace "native language" with a different term, we should avoid it in serious discussions. Instead, we can speak of proficiency, parents passing language to children, the role of education, the ethnic language, the national language, etc. And if we do so, we see that there's nothing wrong or unusual about Ukrainian. If anything, it's huge languages like Russian or English that are unusual. They're different from 99% languages of the world. After all, bilinguals are more common than monolinguals. It's Russian that is a weird outlier, not Ukrainian.
- tannenfreund87 3mo ago
  I grew up in southern Germany, speaking the local dialect. As a young adult, I thought I could speak accent free German. I couldn't have been more wrong. Many people in Hamburg and Berlin rightfully guessed that I'm from Bavaria. Closely related languages and dialects exist in a continuum ((Max Weinreich: "a language is a dialect with an army an a navy"). Many people in Ukraine spoke and speak "surzhyk", depending on the political climate, they could claim to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Then Russian and Ukrainian, together with Belarusian form a dialect continuum. You can easily understand you neighboring village, but it gets harder and harder, the further you are apart until there's very little mutual intelligibility.
  - vkazanov 3mo ago
    I grew up in the east of lithuania, mostly hearing polish and russian in my early years, and then also lithuanian to a smaller degree. I eventually managed to separate the languages proper but I clearly see how the languages are are not a discrete classification. Like, lithuanian polish and lithuanian russian are similar, but polish polish is further away phonetically. Lithuanian has weird phonetics but the underlying grammar is very close to slavic languages. English is much further away on the spectrum but why are sentence intonations (irony , question, etc) are still strangely compatible with languages from other branches of the language tree..? Conclusion: strict language separation is a political construct not a natural thing.
fsckboy 3mo ago
Original statements that led to this discussion >>Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian >This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it. The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does. Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers? Put up or shut up. Russia 143,500,000 Ukraine 45,490,000 Poland 38,530,000 Czechia 10,200,000 Belarus 9,498,700 Bulgaria 7,265,000 Serbia 7,164,000 Slovakia 5,414,000 Croatia 4,253,000 Bosnia and 3,829,000 Herzegovina Slovenia 2,060,000 Montenegro 621,383 The people here ranting about how heated the topic is seem to be the people who want the topic to be heated, I'm thinking Putin knob polishers. What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian? Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two: Ukrainian 32,577,468 67.53% Russian 14,273,670 29.59% wikipedia also says as of 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language 32 million Ukrainian as 1st language 6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language you see? nobody is heated up. And soon, the remaining Russian speakers will be able to learn Ukrainian in school making the problem go away completely.
- egorfine 3mo ago
  > Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian Basically this but not exactly. Number are up for debate because none of the sane estimates put the count of Ukrainians at 45m. It's closer to 37m or even <30m if we discount those who left Ukraine. But yeah, the vast majority of urban population thinks in Russian. Also see an adjacent comment in this thread: if we sum up the predominantly ukrainian-speaking urban centers' population we get to a bit over 11m people which is basically the same figure as Czech language. Thus putting Ukrainian language to the second place even by conservative estimate. Which makes my original point incorrect.