
THE LINGUISTIC ASPECT OF THE POST-COLONIAL MENTALITY OF UKRAINIANS: DESTRUCTION OF THE "RIGHT FOR LANGUAGE" AS FOUNDAMENTAL NATIONAL RIGHT
Author(s) -
Tetiana Katsevych
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
ukraïnoznavčij alʹmanah
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2520-2626
DOI - 10.17721/2520-2626/2018.23.20
Subject(s) - ukrainian , colonialism , slogan , national consciousness , national identity , independence (probability theory) , latvian , pidgin , political science , sociology , political economy , history , linguistics , law , philosophy , politics , statistics , mathematics , creole language
The article is devoted to the analysis of the problem of postcolonial mentality in contemporary Ukraine, in particular the question of its linguistic component. The era of neocolonialism continues to exist even after the actual collapse of the colonial system in the twentieth century. The consequences of the long colonial past of peoples and nations are the deformed sense of national identity and, accordingly, the phenomenon of postcolonial mentality. More than three hundred years of the colonial regime in Ukraine and the purposeful policy of cultural expansion and language oppression promoted the formation of such a distorted type of national consciousness. The main manifestation of post-colonial mentality is a contemptuous attitude to the Ukrainian language, a diminution of its meaning as the foundation for nation-building, since artificially spreaded bilingualism actually appears as a means of Russification. It is proved that, despite the purposeful but inconsistent policy of renaissance during the Independence, the dominant influence of the Russian language in public and everyday use can not be ignored, since these phenomena are mostly chauvinistic in nature, which manifests itself in an apparent offensive on the legitimization of the Ukrainian language as the language of the State Ukraine, as the foundations of the right of the nation as a whole, as well as acting as a field for speculation as a conscious means of successfully manipulated technique in the slogan of the necessity of bilingualism, which is positioned as an essential attribute of the modern globalized world. Ukrainian/Russian dichotomy appears axiologically as shameful / prestigious, which, according to the author, is one of the manifestations of the post-colonial mentality of Ukrainians, namely the linguistic aspect of the functioning and even the collision between two cultures, nations, ideological systems and mentality. The language of the postcolonial mentality of Ukrainians is the subject of an analysis of the problem of finding means and efforts for the consolidation of the Ukrainian nation in connection with the urgent need for confrontation and prevention of linguocide by the aggressor state, since such colonial practices are total anachronism in a democratic society.