During the controversial 2004 elections that
led to the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine, cultural and linguistic differences
threatened to break apart the country. Contested Tongues explains the complex
linguistic and cultural politics in a bilingual country where the two main
languages are closely related but their statuses are hotly contested. Laada
Bilaniuk finds that the social divisions in Ukraine are historically rooted,
ideologically constructed, and inseparable from linguistic practice. She does
not take the labeled categories as givens but questions what “Ukrainian” and
“Russian” mean to different people, and how the boundaries between these
categories may be blurred in unstable times.
Bilaniuk’s analysis of the contemporary situation is based on ethnographic
research in Ukraine and grounded in historical research essential to
understanding developments since the fall of the Soviet Union. “Mixed
language” practices (surzhyk) in Ukraine have generally been either ignored or
reviled, but Bilaniuk traces their history, their social implications, and
their accompanying ideologies. Through a focus on mixed language and purism,
the author examines the power dynamics of linguistic and cultural correction,
through which people seek either to confer or to deny others social
legitimacy. The author’s examination of the rapid transformation of symbolic
values in Ukraine challenges theories of language and social power that have
as a rule been based on the experience of relatively stable societies.
Laada Bilaniuk is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
Chapter 1: Language Paradoxes and Ideologies of Correction
Chapter 2: Lives of Language: Individual Motivations, Practices, and Symbolic
Power in a Changing Social Order
Chapter 3: Language at the Threshold: A History of Ideological Categories and
Corrections
Chapter 4: Surzhyk: A History of Linguistic Transgressions
Chapter 5: Correction, Criticism, and the Struggle over Status
Chapter 6: Concealing Tensions and Mediating Pluralisms
Epilogue: The Languages of Ukraine's Orange Revolution
Appendix: A Comparison of Ukrainian and Russian
Index
256 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 8 tables, 11 halftones, 1 map
Paperback: $24.95, ISBN: 0-8014-7279-2