Ukrainization

Ukrainization (also spelled Ukrainisation or Ukrainianization) is a policy of increasing the usage and facilitating the development of the Ukrainian language and promoting other elements of Ukrainian culture, in various spheres of public life such as education, publishing, government and religion. The term is also used to describe a process by which non-Ukrainians or Russified Ukrainians come to accept Ukrainian culture and language as their own.

The term is used, most prominently, for the Soviet indigenization policy of the 1920s (korenizatsiya, literally ‘putting down roots’), aimed at strengthening Soviet power in the territory of Soviet Ukraine and southern regions of the Russian SFSR. In various forms the Ukrainization policies were also carried in several different periods of the twentieth-century history of Ukraine, although with somewhat different goals and in different historical contexts.

Ukrainization is often cited as a response and the means to address the consequences of previous assimilationist policies aimed at suppressing or even eradicating the Ukrainian language and culture from most spheres of public life, most frequently a policy of Russification in the times of the Russian Empire (see also Ems Ukaz) and in the USSR, but also Polonization and Rumanization in some Western Ukrainian regions.

Following independence, the government of Ukraine began following a policy of Ukrainization, to increase the use of Ukrainian, while discouraging Russian, which has been gradually phased out from the country's education system, government, and national TV, radio programmes and films.

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