Languages

Just before the Berlin Wall came down I was working in Hungary - teaching English to students from The Technical University of Budapest. One evening, I was walking through the city with Ferenc - one of the students. We came to a small marketplace and I noticed twenty or so people in a row holding various items in their hands  - batteries, combs, bottles of shampoo, hair slides, screwdrivers etc.. Their arms were extended and they were calling out.  It was clear that they were trying to sell these items. It was like a market without tables or stalls.

I asked Ferenc what was going on and he said, "Oh, they are Poles!" Later he explained that they were very used to seeing Poles in Hungary - rather desperate people trying to get their feet on the economic ladder in Budapest. A couple of weeks later, near the southern border of the country I came across a similar "market" but here the sellers were Romanian.

These experiences illustrated that, in terms of identity and belonging, central Europe is not at all like England. As history has marched on, the borders of central Europe have been pretty fluid. There are ethnic Hungarians living in Romania and ethnic Romanians and Poles  living in  Hungary. It is a complex web of languages and cultures, not necessarily defined by the borders we find in modern atlases

Click on the map to expand it slightly

All this year we have been hearing the name "Ukraine" - over and over again though perhaps a little less so in recent weeks. I was wondering how old is this country we call Ukraine? 

To really get to grips with that question you would need to unravel many threads from history but what we think of as Ukraine today is arguably only a hundred years old and for more than half that time it was absorbed within The Soviet Union.

The map of Ukraine shown above is divided into its "oblasts" or administrative regions. Four of those oblasts are coloured dark blue for here Russian is the dominant first language. Take the Donetsk oblast for example - there 93% of citizens use Russian in the home.

Over in the west you have eight oblasts in which Ukrainian is spoken by 99-100% of the residents.

Not all of the people who speak Russian have a Russian heritage. Very many are ethnic Ukrainians who adopted Russian in order to fit in with their communities and get by in everyday life - including education and commerce.

I am only touching the surface here. Language use, cultural identities and episodes of note from history have all conspired to create the map of central Europe that we know today. 

It might be convenient to see a cartoon picture in our minds in which the evil tyrant Putin marches into Ukraine to steal land on behalf of his renewed version of The Soviet Union but  maybe it's not quite as simple as that. I'm just sayin'.

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/dBITD5c