Language Politics in Education and the Response of the Russians in Ukraine

Bibliographic Data

ID11045877
AuthorsJ G Janmaat (0000-0001-8102-5047, University of Amsterdam, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume27
Issue3
Pages475-501
Publication date1999-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNationalities Papers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5992 • E-ISSN: 1465-3923
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1080/009059999108975
OpenAlexW2146182980
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited8

Ukraine's independence signaled the end of the post-war Russification of the school system and the beginning of a large scale Ukrainization of the educational sector. From the 1990–1991 school year to the 1997–1998 school year, the national authorities raised the proportion of Ukrainian-instructed school children from 47.9% to 62.8% nationwide. As the language of instruction in Ukraine's schools almost exclusively is either Ukrainian or Russian, the relative percentage of Russian-instructed school children, conversely, declined from 51.4% to 36.4% during the same period. Ukraine is not the only Soviet successor state that has promoted the language of the titular nationality in the sphere of education at the expense of Russian. In Kazakhstan, for example, the proportion of pupils receiving their education in Kazakh grew from 32.4% in 1990–1991 to 40.1% in 1993–1994, and the percentage of Russian-instructed children, accordingly, fell from 65.0% to 57.2%. In Moldova, the number of pupils studying exclusively in Moldovan increased from 424,000 to 447,000 between 1989–1990 and 1992–1993, while the number of pupils studying exclusively in Russian dropped from 290,000 to 262,000

Immigration · Independence (probability theory · Kazakh · Linguistics · Nationality · Political science · Politics · Romanian · Ukrainian · Law · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Multilingual Education and Policy · Post-Soviet Geopolitical Dynamics