Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?

Question

An answer to a different question pointed out that the vast majority of search engine queries coming from Ukraine, before the invasion, seemed to be in Russian. That was despite the fact that the queries shown seemed to be asking for local results.

If this means that most Ukrainians are more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian, that is very surprising, since Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine.

However, I can think of other possible explanations for this observation:

• Perhaps those who are more proficient in Ukrainian, use an alternative search engine?
• Perhaps the users are just choosing the language that will give more or better results, and continue using Russian out of habit even while searching for local results?
• Perhaps familiarity with the Russian keyboard layout forces their choice? That is, what if someone speaks Ukrainian in everyday life, but touch types only in Russian?

So I'm curious if there is other evidence that tells us whether the majority of Ukrainians are more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian, or not.

Answer 1

After researching this a bit, I'm posting an answer to my own question, but I want to say that I welcome more answers, especially if they bring other pieces of evidence.

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A 2008 Gallup poll asked Ukrainians, face-to-face, in what language they preferred to conduct the Gallup interview, and only 17% of the respondents chose Ukrainian. This seems to be in close agreement with the search query stats.

In contrast, in the 2001 census, 67.5% of Ukraine's population stated that Ukrainian was their native language, and only 29.6% picked Russian.

This apparent contradiction might be due to the higher social prestige of Ukrainian, or due to the respondents interpreting the term "native language" as something distinct from "the language you learned from your parents" or "the language you know best".

This distinction seems to be echoed by an article in The Atlantic titled "Ukrainian is my native language, but I had to learn it".

Answer 2

Looking at this from a software developer's perspective, there's a significant factor here that you may have overlooked. Translating a program or a website is a significant amount of work, testing, and upkeep, and that work has to be repeated for each and every language that the site supports. When you look at the Internet as a whole, few websites support more than one language and exceedingly few websites support more than 2-3 languages.

Russian is the world's 7th most common language, with roughly 6x as many native speakers as there are of Ukrainian. Therefore, the odds that any specific website supports Russian are significantly higher than they are for the website to support Ukrainian.

A Ukrainian citizen interacting with a website in Russian should not be assumed to imply that they're more proficient in or prefer using Russian. Instead, Russian may have been used simply because Ukrainian was either not supported or support for it was poor. There is a large portion of the Internet where Russian is the primary language and Russian technology companies like Vk and Yandex are popular and influential. Internet users in those areas may use Russian out of necessity, similar to how there are many Stackexchange users that post in English despite it not being their language of choice. Even if sites like Google do technically support Ukrainian, Internet users may simply interact using Russian out of habit. They have their browser locale set to Russian for compatibility with the rest of the Internet, and using that setting everywhere becomes easier than changing it back and forth for specific websites.

Answer 3

The answer is certainly no. We cannot say that this is true for the "vast" majority (say 80%), but maybe this is 50/50. In the south and east, people speak better russian due to their roots (naturally, without ideology). In the cities people might also speak more in russian (before the war) with sometimes the thought that the ukrainian language is for rednecks. This might be because of propaganda/attacks from Russia, or because the russian language is a lingua franca spoken by a lot more people than the ukrainian one.

Again due to the fact that russian is a lingua franca, it might be true that a higher proportion of expatriated ukrainians might speak better russian.

For remainder, ukrainian is the only official language in Ukraine. As a minimum, everybody understand well ukrainian, though sometimes don't speak it (or mix it with russian, суржик). This is unlike Belarus, where russian is also an official language and people really don't need belarusian.

As a comment to Eugene Morozov: it seems exagerated to say that people are beaten up for speaking russian. They might be if they express pro-Pountine ideas. My mother-is-law is ukrainian and speak only russian. She has never been beaten up... Also, the existence of a state (human convention) can be decorrelated from that of a people. The existence of the ukrainian language is the proof that the ukrainian people has existed long enough for a language to form.

Moreover, the ukrainian language sometimes differs greatly from the russian language, and sometimes is more genuinely slavian than russian. For people interested, just look at the months (January, February, March...) in russian, and in ukrainian. In russian, it is just a copy of our "western" months, with russian pronounciation. In ukrainian, it is something completely different, with references to the cycle of nature (and similar to Polish)

disclosure: french, fluent in russian, learning ukrainian, married to a ukrainian woman who speaks better russian than ukrainian