Ukrainian Is My Native Language, but I Had to Learn It

Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home. Back then, in that part of the country, Ukrainian was reserved for formal settings: schools, banks, and celebrations, often infused with a performative flare of ethnic pride. Russian dominated the mundane and the intimate: gossiping with friends during recess, writing in a journal, arguing with parents. I straddled both languages with my grandmother, who spoke surzhyk, a colloquial mix of the two.

I spoke Russian not because I had any particular connection to it, but because it was an easy default. For 400 years, Russian had seeped into Ukrainian life and across Ukrainian territory: In the process of colonizing the south of Ukraine, the Russian empire called the area the “New Russia,” imposing the language of the metropole on the Ukrainian-speaking population. During the 19th century, Russians, as well as members of other ethnic minorities, populated newly industrialized towns in the Donbas region to work in factories and mines while rural areas remained