“The use of language is inherently political.” Ukrainians are switching massively from Russian to the Ukrainian language – an international study

Russian-speaking Ukrainians switched to the Ukrainian language en masse with the beginning of the Russian invasion, scientists from Germany and Great Britain who conducted research studying the behavior of users of the X network (formerly Twitter) testified.

“More than half of the users who tweeted in Russian switch to Ukrainian with the Russian invasion,” the researchers say.

Researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Bath in Great Britain analyzed the use of social media by Ukrainians before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

An interdisciplinary group of scientists who studied the behavior of users of social networks found that the trend towards greater use of the Ukrainian language in social networks in Ukraine existed already after the Euromaidan and the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, but after the Russian large-scale aggression in 2022, Ukrainians made a sharp transition from the use of the Russian language to Ukrainian.

“Language use is inherently political, often a vehicle for cultural identity and a foundation for nation-building,” the researchers said in their paper.

According to the scientists, the results of their joint research indicate that it is about “a conscious choice of users in favor of a more Ukrainian (online) identity and self-definition as Ukrainians.”

“Obviously, the war forces people to abandon the Russian language more,” he said Daniel Rachek, lead author of the study and PhD in the Department of Statistics at LMU University of Munich. The researchers published their findings in the journal Communications Psychology.

The researchers studied nearly 4.5 million tweets from nearly 63,000 users of the X Network (formerly Twitter) from January 2020 to November 2022, and used artificial intelligence and statistical analysis to process the data.

“We studied how Ukrainian citizens (and non-citizens living there) react to aggressive attacks and invasions of their country by an immediate neighbor with whom they share a common history and language, and how the use of language evolved before and during the war,” – reported in the document.

They added that they were able to observe people’s behavior in both the short and long term, “without relying on small surveys or infrequent censuses, the last of which was conducted in 2001.”

At the same time, the study also indicated that X network users are an age-limited group of people. According to their data, Ukrainian Twitter is used by people aged 18–29 (13%), 30–39 (8%), 40–49 (7%), 50+ (1%).