Recently, I had an argument with an editor who tried to convince me that I was writing my surname incorrectly.
He insisted that it should be written differently in Slovak and that it was written non-slovakly in my official documents. He claimed that I should change my Siedykh to Sedychová. For about half an hour, I tried in vain to explain to him that his proposed surname simply doesn't belong to me, while mine already exists in Slovak documents, I pay taxes under it in Slovakia, receive my salary with it, and use it in media and personal spaces. Despite this, he tried to force the suffix -ová on me, which is not native to my language and which I'm not accustomed to, as I associate it with patriarchal influences. After all, it concerns the official transliteration of surnames from Cyrillic to Latin script, which can certainly be criticised for not taking into account the functioning of all languages. It tries to create a universal principle that most closely approximates English.
I'm not trying to challenge Slovak orthographic and linguistic tendencies, as I'm neither a Slovak linguist nor a philologist and I'm not competent to do so. However, after this conversation, I began thinking a lot about how easily one can be anaesthetised, made vulnerable, and stripped of part of their identity through such a change.
Among the arguments made in this peculiar discussion was that language is simply a way people communicate with each other, and thus is merely an information medium. This view denies the fact that language exists in context. As if it existed in a timeless void and wasn't influenced at all by the complex political processes that modify it. Recently, a new book about the political nature of language, "The Politics of Language" by David I. Beaver and Jason Stanley, was published. It presents 520 pages of facts showing why language is political. And how our use of certain words and phrases can change reality, emotions, and justify violent behaviour. The authors describe, for example, how when young Black Americans began to be labelled as "super predators" in official and media channels, it affected the general perception of young Black people in America and triggered a wave of violence against them. Similar examples can be found in various areas and contexts, having an enormous impact on people's perceptions. Besides the fact that language can incite violence or strengthen systems of inequality, it can even be dangerous for the people who use it.
Ukraine is a perfect example of this. Even before the total war, I met puzzled people in Slovakia who had no idea that Ukrainian differs from Russian. Now I constantly encounter misunderstanding about why we want to write Kyiv instead of Kiev and label other city names based on Ukrainian transliteration. In reality, we don't even need to be great experts to notice that, for example, Záporožie is identical to the Russian name and differs from the Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia.
Unfortunately, language can be influenced by both internal and external politics. Given the sad fact that the Ukrainian language was constantly banned and long remained non-unified, it's not surprising that many countries adhere to names in the Russian language. As soon as Ukraine gained independence (1991) and has been actively defending it militarily for several years now, many states worldwide are changing the names of Ukrainian cities and other names in their languages to reflect the Ukrainian perspective. That is, the perspective of the colonised, of those who had no voice for a very long time. And these aren't just empty words. In 2024, even Germany, after thorough discussion, began writing Kyjiw instead of Kiew.
During the Russian empire and later under Soviet rule, the Ukrainian language faced bans that prevented its development. During the existence of the Soviet Union, what linguists later called linguicide occurred. Special commissions dealing with language were created, whose tasks included revision of words, spelling and terminology, and the prohibition of publishing Ukrainian language dictionaries. In 1933, the Ukrainian orthography called Skrypnykivka was banned, and later its authors were arrested, with many becoming victims of Stalinist terror – some were murdered, others were arrested and persecuted. A new commission began working on dictionaries for Soviet Ukrainians. In practice, it looked like this: Russian equivalents were assigned to Ukrainian words, causing the Ukrainian language to lose many words which were replaced by Russified words. The policy of linguistic similarity emphasised the illusory brotherhood that Russian propaganda speaks of to this day. Paradoxically, the concept of brotherhood is often proclaimed in their statements by opposition, anti-Putin politicians from Russia, including the deceased Alexei Navalny. The result of these processes and efforts is the myth that Ukrainian is a Russian dialect, that it's a language that has many similarities with Russian. However, one only needs to look at the list of eliminated words to understand that this similarity was artificially created.
Terror in the Soviet Union didn't just suppress words. It went to the point of absurdity. The Ukrainian letter Ґ (g) was banned for 57 years. In 1933, it was removed as a "bourgeois nationalist" letter and didn't return until 1990. They removed it to visually bring Ukrainian closer to Russian, which doesn't have such a character.
Currently, we can observe how letters and words in Ukraine are gaining political context. In occupied territories, people draw the letter "Ї", which doesn't exist in Russian, as a sign of protest against occupation and disagreement with the regime.
Changes from the Soviet era didn't just affect dictionaries, but also more intimate things including names and surnames. When issuing passports in the Soviet Union, surnames that had indicators of ethnic affiliation were modified – this is how the surnames of Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, and national minorities were changed. This continues to complicate people's lives. They cannot trace their own family tree, and many have problems with inheritance.
The consequences of this "unification" trend can be observed to this day. Even current Russian policy maintains the view that the Ukrainian language is just a dialect of Russian, that Ukrainians and Russians are one nation. And this, in their view, gives them the right to attack "their" territories with the aim of liberation.
Ukraine and other countries suffered a loss of memory, not only personal but also collective. People became more susceptible to propaganda trends, memory became fragile and easily manipulated. An example of such destruction of language and its replacement is Belarusian, which is considered a language of protest against the government and Russian influence in Belarus and abroad.
To call language a common means of communication means ignoring its influence and constant interaction with changing political and social phenomena.