The Ukrainian language in a time of war, with Yuri Shevchuk

Professor Yuri Shevchuk speaks about his experiences with the Ukrainian language in his early life. He shares how he became a teacher of Ukrainian and an advocate for the language, and how he wrote a bilingual English-Ukrainian collocation dictionary. He also discusses the impact that Putin's incursion into Ukraine in Spring 2022 has had on how the language is being spoken today.

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0:00 Introduction
1:07 Start of interview
1:37 Growing up speaking Surzhyk
4:37 Choosing to speak Ukrainian at university
10:54 Combining Ukrainian and English
11:48 Teaching English in Ukraine during Perestroika
14:13 Translating subversive texts in the 1980s
15:04 Coming to the US to teach Ukrainian
19:01 Ukrainian's relationship to other Slavic languages
22:40 Ukrainian and Russian are not mutually intelligible
25:35 Ukrainian as a shibboleth in the current war
26:33 Language communities in present-day Ukraine
30:45 Switching between Russian and Ukrainian as a survival strategy
35:04 Russian speakers now speaking Ukrainian only
36:42 The future of the Ukrainian language
38:29 Writing the first Ukrainian-English collocation dictionary
43:28 "Non-equivalent items"
46:45 How the dictionary was anticipatory of Russia's incursion
49:48 Language as a citadel of identity