Putin's War Is Changing How People Speak in Ukraine

Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine is changing how people are speaking, new research has found.

Researchers from LMU Munich, the University of Bath, and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) reached this conclusion by analyzing social media language before and after the war broke out. Their findings are published in the journal Communications Psychology.

Most Ukrainians are fluent in Russian and Ukrainian because Russian culture was widespread during the days of the Soviet Union. However, the study's results showed a dramatic shift from the use of the Russian language to Ukrainian after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

"The most interesting finding was the very abrupt shift in language with the start of the Russian invasion. I would have expected this to be a more gradual process. But a considerable amount of users switched from Russian to Ukrainian immediately after the outbreak of the war," Daniel Racek, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at LMU's Department of Statistics, told Newsweek.

Racek and his team looked at over 4 million tweets from 63,000 social media users in Ukraine between January 2020 and October 2022. Upon the outbreak of war, they discovered that a shift from Russian to Ukrainian accelerated.

There is evidence that the Russian language was becoming less popular in Ukraine even before the war, following the annexation of Crimea in 2013/2014. The findings by Racek and his team suggest that the current conflict has caused a sharp uptick in those using Ukrainian.

"In former Soviet countries, language played and still plays, quite an important role. The Soviet union implemented various policies to establish Russian as the main language (a process known as russification). Since its collapse many countries—including Ukraine—have tried, and are still trying, to revert this as part of their national identity," Racek said.

"At least in Ukraine, change had been very slow. However, with the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, surveys showed that this shift might have sped up. Hence, we were really interested in identifying and analyzing possible changes before and after the war on a much larger scale.

"And while recently there have been a lot of interviews with Ukrainians who were saying they are no longer using Russian; in my opinion it is always important to back up such findings quantitatively with data."

The team concluded that this change must be down to political attitudes. Ukrainians are shifting away from Russian culture and language as a way to distance themselves from Moscow as much as possible. They found that most people are making a conscious effort to speak less Russian, with some even dropping the language altogether.

"Social media is critically important in today's society," the authors wrote in the study. "In recent years, it has played a key role in a number of political shifts and crises. While social media has been found to amplify all manners of misinformation, propaganda, populism, and xenophobia, it can also serve as a mechanism to call for aid and as a source for live updates of major events unfolding."

As the war is taking place in the "digital era" the study notes that there are more updates than ever before of "the horrific events" in real time.

"This provides a unique digital trace of many first-hand accounts of the war, as citizens are communicating among each other and to the public," the study says.

"This is generally known as crisis informatics, whereby social media data are utilized before, during, or after emergency events for use [in] cases such as disaster monitoring, management, and prevention," it says. "Recent studies have demonstrated that tweets can capture events of political violence and can help in monitoring and understanding intra-country conflicts."

Research in this area is not over. Racek said that it would be interesting to observe whether a familiar shift has occured in other former Soviet countries.

"With respect to Ukraine and our work, we are investigating what more information we can draw from the tweets. For example, we are currently testing if we can match tweets to specific locations using machine-learning techniques.

"In the wider conflict literature, our working group has projects on using remote sensing data, [such as] satellite imagery, for investigating armed conflict, designing statistical methods for the diffusion of conflict across time and space, and the effects of climate change on conflict."

UPDATE 01/15/2024 ET 6:20 a.m: This article was updated to include quotes from Daniel Racek

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about language? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.