Ukrainian speakers leave Donetsk amid pro-Russia surge

BBC ^ | 13 May 2014 Last updated at 07:24 ET | By Richard Galpin

[FreeReign]

Ukrainian speakers in the eastern region of Donetsk have started leaving the area, fearing for their safety as pro-Russian militants tighten their grip.

The declaration on Monday by separatist leaders that their self-declared "Donetsk People's Republic" was now an independent, sovereign state which could ultimately be absorbed into Russia is likely to hasten the exodus.

"If a separate Donetsk People's Republic is founded here, I will have to leave," says Olga, a businesswoman and single mother with a young daughter.

[rbmillerjr]

“The Kiev regime has a choice: negotiate a peace and allow a small portion of their nation to secede, or put down the insurrection by force, and rule by repression”

The ball is in the insurgents court. They can lay down their arms and come out of the buildings they are holding illegally... and by agreement by Russia, were to come out weeks ago.

[dangus]

Don’t misunderstand me: Ukraine COULD HAVE been a bilingual state. But that ship has sailed. Both languages are getting their propaganda from opposite sides, and there’s not enough in common. (Actually, Switzerland has FOUR official languages,... but also highly autonomous cantons.)

[dfwgator]

I think the comparison with Northern Ireland is apropos, many parallels, “Holomodor” = “Potato Famine”

[dangus]

For now, “Ukrainian” persists by suppressing Russian. More Ukrainians speak Russian than “Ukrainian” in their own home. In the last census, many of these call Ukrainian their native language because they regard themselves as Ukrainian, not Russian, and Ukrainian is the language of Ukraine. And I think this is where outsiders tragically misunderstood the situation on the ground: they figured Russians were a 17% minority, but when the Western press demonizes “Russians”, all of the 34% of Ukrainians who identified Russian as their “native language” probably identify with those demonized. And that’s a massive supermajority of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Beyond that, the 45% of Ukrainians who choose to speak Russian in their homes (including nearly 100% of Donetsk and Luhansk residents), in the face of official discrimination against Russian, are probably more effective propagandized by Moscow than Kiev. And this is where the portion of Donetsk and Luhansk voters who favor secession could have grown so quickly as unarmed civilians get killed.

[varmintman]

Ebonics will be the official government language of the US.

Thanks, I'd forgotten about that one...

[dangus]

I disagree about the internet killing off languages. The internet will create a limited number of linguae franca (is that pluralization correct?), but international, internet English (for instance) is shallow, inarticulate, and useless for legal, technical, religious or literary purposes.

One of the revolutions of Anglosphere Protestantism was the elimination of using separate languages for writing vs. speaking, and even in the pre-internet era, there were strongly distinct tones in writing vs. speaking English. We forget that for a millenium, Europe spoke dozens of languages while writing exclusively in Latin. Or that the Islamic world speaks 100 languages, but writes chiefly in Arabic. This is NORMAL. And when Dutch or Norwegian or Swedish people use the internet, they will write in English, but speak in Dutch, Norwegian or Swedish.

[Cronos]

There is practically no ethnic difference between Ukrainians and Moscowites. The languages are similar (not the same, but similar) and their histories are intertwined.

[Cronos]

no, sudentenland was not the end. If you read the Mein K, Hitler was very clear on what he wanted to do.

[Cronos]

Russians (racially)?? the “race” of both Moscowites and Ukrainians are the same, both East Slavic peoples.

[Cronos]

. Even fifteen years from now, there are going to be no more than ten or twelve languages which anybody still speaks: Two Germanic languages (English and German), three Romance languages (French, Spanish, and Italian), one Slavic language (Russian), Hebrew, Ababic, one subcontinent language (Hindi), both flavors of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and that's about it

Sorry, that's false, and here's why:

1. germanic languages: the swedes, norwegians, Danes etc. are proud to speak English fluently but also retain their national languages. Also, what you call German is standard German, yet the regional languages like Swabian and Bavarian persist -- these are called dialects but imho are closer to languages
2. Romance languages -- you forget the big one: Portuguese. Besides that, Romanian is still going strong
3. Slavic language: utterly wrong. No Slav outside Russia/Ukraine/Belarus wants to speak Russian -- Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian/Macedonian are going strong
4. Indian languages -- while Hindi is strong, it's only 40% of India's population who speak it. The other indo-european languages like Punjabi, Marathi and Bengali have millions if not hundreds of millions of speakers. Besides this there are the Dravidian languages like Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada even Tulu which are very strong -- Tamil is spread over nearly 70 million speakers over a wider geographic area
5. and you forget Swahili and Bahasa Indonesian

[bill1952]

There are more languages than that in Africa...

[McGruff]

The ball is in the insurgents court. They can lay down their arms and come out of the buildings they are holding illegally.

You sure you're not talking about the regime in Kiev?

[varmintman]

And they’ll all be gone in 20 years...

[rbmillerjr]

Repeating your Russian propaganda narrative makes it no less a lie. It is Russian propaganda no matter how many times you say it. lol

The Russian stooge is back in Russia and was removed legally from office after he quit. He quit because he was going to go to jail for betraying and stealing money from Ukraine.

[RitchieAprile]

it would seem to be the correct strategy were one not to wish to assume room temperature..