News Feed

The Kyiv Independent’s contributor Ignatius Ivlev-Yorke spent a day with a mobile team from the State Emergency Service in Nikopol in the south of Ukraine as they responded to relentless drone, artillery, and mortar strikes from Russian forces just across the Dnipro River. Nikopol is located across from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Enerhodar.

Show More
News Feed

Government approves Ukrainian language development program until 2030

2 min read
Government approves Ukrainian language development program until 2030
Ukrainian flag waving over Parliament in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Getty Images)

Ukraine's government has greenlit a comprehensive program aimed at bolstering the Ukrainian language's role as the state language across all aspects of public life until 2030.

Crafted by the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, the initiative aims to counteract Russification effects while promoting wider adoption and utilization of the Ukrainian language.

Acting Culture Minister Rostyslav Karandieiev emphasized the program's dual focus on domestic language promotion and international outreach, highlighting Ukraine's linguistic resilience.

By 2030, proficiency in the state language, adhering to Ukrainian spelling and standards, will be mandatory for all civil servants. Ukrainian will be the primary language for communication, office tasks, and information retrieval, with measures planned to assist business employees in mastering it.

The ministry aims for Ukrainians to predominantly speak Ukrainian in daily life, facilitated by access to high-quality cultural products and Ukrainian-language content. The program targets an ambitious goal: by 2030, 80% of Ukrainians should speak Ukrainian at home, and the proportion of Ukrainian-language cultural products is expected to rise from 55% to 85%.

Ukrainians are widely opposed to the use of the Russian language in official settings, with 81% against Russian being used as an official language in their region or as a state language, a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) released on March 12 found.

Poll: Vast majority of Ukrainians against Russian as official or state language
The poll reflects changes in Ukrainians’ perception of the Russian language outside the domestic sphere since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Avatar
Olena Goncharova

Head of North America desk

Olena Goncharova is the Head of North America desk at The Kyiv Independent, where she has previously worked as a development manager and Canadian correspondent. She first joined the Kyiv Post, Ukraine's oldest English-language newspaper, as a staff writer in January 2012 and became the newspaper’s Canadian correspondent in June 2018. She is based in Edmonton, Alberta. Olena has a master’s degree in publishing and editing from the Institute of Journalism in Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. Olena was a 2016 Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellow who worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for six months. The program is administered by the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia.

Read more