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Study: Use of Ukrainian increased on social media amid Russia’s all-out war

Study shows over 50% of Russian-tweeting Ukrainians switched to their native tongue since the full-scale invasion, seen as opposing Moscow, embracing national identity and linguistic roots as Ukrainian tweeting takes off.

byYuri Zoria

07/02/2024

3 minute read

Ukrainian language’s unique letter Ї. Illustrative image: VoA

Study: Use of Ukrainian increased on social media amid Russia’s all-out war

Russian-speaking Ukrainians have been switching to Ukrainian en masse since the outset of the full-scale Russian invasion, according to researchers from Germany and the UK who conducted a study examining the language choice of Ukrainian users on X (former Twitter) social media platform.

Amid Russian propaganda that falsely claimed “Russian speakers’ oppression in Ukraine” as one of the cornerstone justifications for aggression, many Ukrainians, who are mostly bilingual, started to prefer Ukrainian over Russian in daily life, a trend also reflected in their Twitter posts. This study examines how this narrative influenced a noticeable shift towards the Ukrainian language on social media, amidst broader real-life linguistic changes.

More than half of the Russian-tweeting Ukrainian users switched towards Ukrainian with the full-scale Russian invasion, according to the findings of the study titled “The Russian war in Ukraine increased Ukrainian language use on social media” conducted by the researchers from Germany’s Munich-based Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) and Technical University of Munich (TUM), and the UK-based University of Bath.

“The use of language is innately political, often a vehicle of cultural identity and the basis for nation building. Here, we examine language choice and tweeting activity of Ukrainian citizens based on 4,453,341 geo-tagged tweets from 62,712 users before and during the [all-out] Russian war in Ukraine, from January 2020 to October 2022,” the researchers wrote in the abstract to the paper.

Researchers used statistical models to separate sample effects (X’s user influx and outflux) from behavioral effects. They noted a steady shift from Russian to Ukrainian pre-war, accelerating during the all-out war.

Russian in red, Ukrainian in blue, English in green. From 9th January to 12th October (1008 days). The first vertical line denotes the mobilization of the Russian troops along the Ukrainian border (11th November 2021). The second line denotes the outbreak of the war (24th February 2022).

“Notably, our analysis shows that more than half of the Russian-tweeting users switch towards Ukrainian with the Russian invasion. We interpret these findings as users’ conscious choice towards a more Ukrainian (online) identity and self-definition of being Ukrainian,” the paper reads.

The researchers noted a significant acceleration in the shift from Russian to Ukrainian following the start of Russian aggression in November 2021, when Russia started to pull its troops toward Ukrainian borders, and the subsequent outbreak of the full-scale war in February 2022. Over several months, the probability of Ukrainian tweets rises from 48% to 76%. While some of this increase stems from user flux, behavioral changes play a major role.

Roughly half of users who predominantly tweeted in Russian before the war now tweet more in Ukrainian. This shift is likely a politicized response to distance oneself from supporting the war. Hard-switching to Ukrainian appears to correlate with increased Twitter activity and follower counts, possibly driven by social media pressures.

In conclusion, the paper authors highlighted substantial shifts away from the Russian language to Ukrainian, which “we interpret as users’ conscious choice towards a more Ukrainian (online) identity.”

“More than half of the predominately Russian-tweeting users shift towards Ukrainian, and a quarter of them even perform a hard-switch to Ukrainian, as the [all-out] war breaks out,” the authors wrote, adding: “This can be seen as citizens’ increasing opposition to Russia and a return to the country’s linguistic roots as well as a push towards a conscious self-definition of being Ukrainian.”

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Study: Use of Ukrainian increased on social media amid Russia’s all-out war

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