ABSTRACT
After the collapse of the USSR where Russian was the lingua franca, Ukraine has adopted a monolingual policy by making Ukrainian the sole official language and promoting its standardization. This chapter analyzes four metalinguistic interviews with young Ukrainians who report practicing ‘non-accommodating bilingualism’ at home (when one family member speaks Russian and the other Ukrainian) to investigate how family linguistic practices are negotiated against the backdrop of government-backed monolingualism. The analysis shows that, by taking up defensive stances to assert that speaking different languages does not inhibit family communication and expressing respect for each other’s linguistic preferences, the interviewees both (re)claim the ordinariness of their families and their linguistic practices and engage in private acts of speakers’ rights. Furthermore, while the interviewees subscribe to the symbolic ideal of ‘pure’ language, they are not only tolerant of translanguaging but also practice it by drawing on Ukrainian, Russian, surzhyk (a set of stigmatized Russian/Ukrainian mixed varieties), and English, thus revealing a discrepancy between the state-sponsored monoglot standard ideology and local translingualism. Finally, with family viewed as both reflective and constitutive of society, this study shows how metalinguistic interviews can reveal competing linguistic ideologies circulating in Ukraine.
