Language and Power in Ukraine and Kazakhstan

This is the first such collection of essays presenting a critical multi-author examination of language and power relations in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The post-Soviet period in Ukraine and Kazakhstan has been characterized not only by changes in the economic marketplace in the transition from communism to capitalism, but also in the linguistic marketplace. During the Soviet period, Russian was the primary language of schooling, media, and government administration in both countries, leading to widespread language shift away from their titular languages, especially among the educated urban elites. Since independence, Ukrainian and Kazakh, which occupied relatively peripheral positions in the Soviet-era marketplace, have been elevated to the status of national languages and institutionalized in government and schools, thus increasing their symbolic power. Nevertheless, the years since independence have also seen contentious debates around language.
Employing various methodological tools ranging from surveys to critical discourse analysis of legislation, literary texts and social media products, the authors in this volume seek to demonstrate and explain how political relations and hegemonic ideologies have been reproduced and negotiated at both the macro-level in legislation on language and state-sponsored media channels and embodiments of political and linguistic ideologies in translations, as well as at the micro-level of everyday language practices, school choice, and discourses on social media platforms. Among the authors are Elise S. Ahn, Igor Danylenko, Bridget Goodman, Lada Kolomiyets, Natalia Kudriavtseva, Svitlana Melnyk, Juldyz Smagulova, Yuliia Soroka, and Maryna Vardanian.

Dr. Natalia Kudriavtseva is Professor of Translation and Slavic Studies at Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University. She is also a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia. Kudriavtseva was a fellow at the School for Advanced Study in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris (2023), Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst (2022-2023) and Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study in Greifswald (2022). She has been a member of editorial boards of the Ideology and Politics Journal, Іноземна філологія (Foreign Philology) as well as Актуальні проблеми духовності (Actual Problems of Mind) and has written for the Kennan Focus Ukraine blog and Germany-based Ukraine-Analysen as well as Ukrainian Analytical Digest.

Dr. Debra A. Friedman is Associate Professor of Second Language Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work on the role of language teaching in the revitalization of the Ukrainian language and the construction of national identity has been published in Applied Linguistics, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, International Journal of Multilingualism and several edited volumes. Friedman is co-author of Understanding, Evaluating, and Conducting Second Language Writing Research (Routledge 2017) and author of Researching Second Language Classrooms (in progress).

Dr. Laada Bilaniuk is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Dr. Yuliia Soroka studied sociology at Karazin National University of Kharkiv where she is, since 2014, a Professor of Sociology. She is also Senior Researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Previously, she held a Fulbright Scholarship at the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC, a non-resident Prisma Ukraïna Fellowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, Gerda Henkel Fellowship, and Scholars at Risk Fellowship at the University of Fribourg. She is a member of the boards of the journals Sociology: Theory, Methods and Marketing and Sociological Studies of Contemporary Society: Methodology, Theory, Methods. Her previous books include The Native, Strange, and Different: A Sociocultural Perspective on the Perception of the Other (Kharkiv National University 2012) and chapters in War, Migration, Memory: Perspectives on Russia's War Against Ukraine (transcript 2025) and War in Ukraine 2022: Personal Experiences of Ukrainian Scholars (ibidem 2024). Her papers have been published by, among other outlets, Symbolic Interaction, and The Ideology and Politics Journal.