Bill 7633 on the restriction of the use of Russian text sources in Ukrainian research and education: analysing dynamics of the language policy in times of war

This study looks into the current language policy in education and research in Ukraine and focuses on the issue of the influence of Russia-Ukraine war on shaping and debating this policy.

For centuries now, Ukraine has been a site of conflicts over language rights. During 70 years of Soviet leadership, Ukraine experienced various forms of Russification, which resulted in a severe domain loss for the Ukrainian language. After breaking from the Soviet rule, the Ukrainian language became an increasingly powerful symbol of national identity. A sequence of laws accompanied this Ukrainisation. Russia’s full-scale invasion increased linguistic tensions.

In December 2022, the Ukrainian parliament adopted, in the first reading, Bill 7633, aiming to strongly restrict the use of Russian in education and research in Ukraine. However, the bill was met with criticism and experienced intensified debates, both in legislative discourses and public journalist outlets. 

This study zeros in on the discourses on the Bill 7633 and uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the research methodology. The legal text itself, governmental comments on it, as well as publicly available journalistic texts, are subjected to the CDA. We explain the stakes of the linguistic situation in Ukraine, reveal the reasons for controversial norms suggested by the Bill and argue that public discussion of the Bill is evidence of a deeply democratic practice of adopting legislation. This study contributes to the recently emerged, i.e. since the start of Russian annexation of the Crimea in 2014, body of CDA work analysing political and public discourses of Russo-Ukrainian war.