Bilingualism as a conflicted form of life

The work presents competing discourses around bilingualism that surround fluctuating national identity in Ukraine. The use of Ukrainian and Russian languages has been for a long time a highly sensitive issue, repeatedly taking shape as an instrument of political campaigns and overt propaganda, and continues to be a subject of debates and tensions. Crimean crisis and the war in the East of Ukraine are not merely clearly-cut results of Russian military strategy and aggression. Other poignant factors are: long-lasting unresolved language issues, artificially imposed linguistic monism, and conflicted national identity that constituted a conflicted form of life characteristic to Ukraine. They are attributable to centuries of particular historical development and bewildering post-Soviet heritage but constructed through Russian political propaganda and forced Ukrainian policies toward exclusion. This work explores national identity through the language situation in Ukraine to gain a holistic grasp of how exclusive Ukrainian language legislation influences the nation's cultural-linguistic settings. The given study claims that the development of the linguistic landscape in Ukraine climaxed in a setting of de jure monolingual, yet de facto bilingual country: the new language legislation requires all..