Aliona: [starts speaking Ukrainian] We know, that our reality has a great impact on our language, and language impacts our reality just as much. When the full-scale invasion started, I was in the middle of research, for my dissertation, on invective [swear] lexis in Ukrainian language, in a political discourse. Because of that, certainly, I got a lot more material to research. Eh, right before the full-scale invasion, to swear in our infospace was some sort of a taboo. I mean, swearing always existed and people were always swearing, but they usually did it with people they knew, with people that accepted it, if… if other people didn’t judge them, then they did it in their bubble, among ‘their own’. But swearing somewhere in the media, in public space, in public places, eh, in printed media, it was condemned. Not approved. When the full-scale invasion started, it changed a bit.
I remember how I came back to Kyiv to get some of my things, because I was in Kyiv region, and I saw not that far away, near my home, a big poster with a picture that you can now see on [post] marks, on some of the postcards with a picture of a soldier, who gives a middle finger to a russian warship, and, respectively, with this phrase «Russian warship, go fuck yourself». Eh… what is interesting about swearing, is that in order to translate it to the other language, it is always a challenge. It is not easy, because… uh, you can translate it literally, but then they will have a bit of a different meaning.
When I saw this poster, I thought: «Oh God, Ukrainians, you’re going, you’re going crazy», because I’ve never seen something like this, eh, but we also never lived through anything like this. I started to think, why is that? Why swearing and this picture appeared on this poster? I realized, that in those first days of the full-scale invasion Ukrainians had so much rage, so little understanding of what even is happening, but at the same time, uh… so much energy to do something, they were ready to do something, but, eh… a lot of people lost everything, and they had no idea what to do with all those emotions, with this big amount of negative emotions and energy, that they, uh, had. People were in shock from what was happening, so their most natural reaction was aggression. This was an aggression, of course, towards russians, and of course it turned to swearing. People were swearing while reading news, swearing at russians, cursing them, and the swearing… was in abundance. I think that maybe Ukrainians and russians became the nations who swear the most, for a while. So this was a way for people to get their emotions and their energy out, and no one even thought of how it was taboo before.
For a while it stopped being taboo, and it freed our emotions. So the story with russian warship and this phrase, for Ukrainians it was not only a story about swearing, not a symbol of something bad, but a symbol of resistance. When, you’d think, in a hopeless situation a soldier, who can get killed, who can get captured, he doesn’t give up. Instead of giving up he’s telling this warship «Go fuck yourself», even if he knows he’ll die. So, for Ukrainians it became a symbol that even if you’re in a dead end, you don’t betray your principles, you don’t put, don’t put your weapon away. You continue to fight, even if swearing is your only weapon.
Um, the other interesting occurrence was about the word «orcs». Before the full-scale invasion, when I heard this word, when anyone heard this word, the first association was with, of course, «The Lord of the Rings». When russians attacked us, people started to call them «orcs» and draw parallels between the book, the movie and our, eh, situation. Eh, a lot of people started calling russia «Mordor», so this word for a while, I think, until now, if we read something about orcs or Mordor, we don’t think… we don’t think of the book nor we think of the movie anymore. We think of our reality. This is how words can change their meaning.
The other interesting word that I never heard before but started to hear after February 24th, 2022, is a word «pigdog» [свинособака]. Like a pig and a dog but in one word. When I tried, when I heard, that some of the Ukrainians call russians that way… someone would call them just «pigs», someone would call them just «dogs», someone would call them «pigdogs». Eh, some people were judging the others and saying «Do not call them like this. Dogs are good and pigs are good. When you call them [russians] names of animals, you automatically insult the animals, because animals could never do those awful things that russians do».
I started to search for this term to get to know if it’s something that we made up, or if it’s something that was created before? And turns out that actually it is a literal translation from a German word «sw… wi…» [Innerer Schweinehund – inner pig-dog] how was it… a compound word from «pig» and «dog», and they have a concept of a «pig-dog», I mean, this inner, such unpleasant creature that lives inside in every one of us, and what you can talk to inside of your head and can get into an agreement with. And I even found that somewhere, I think, in Germany, they have a statue of this, eh, «pig-dog». Eh… it’s interesting how this word came to us, and that we started to call russians this way. But I think that it did not last long. Somewhere after… in 20, in 2023 I heard and read this word less and less. But this, this happened 100 percent. I think that’s all. [starts speaking English] That’s what, eh, what connected, what’s exactly about [this] word… Do I still have time to tell the thought?
Vic: Yeah, yeah.
Aliona: I still have time. That was a lot of talks… (Vic laughs) So now I will try to ma… to say the same, maybe not exactly word by word the same but in, in English for you to understand what I said.
Vic: Yeah, yeah.
Aliona: And if it will be, if it will be helpful.
Vic: I think I understood like, quite a bit of it. You speak very clear Ukrainian. I guess, because you’re a teacher, so you…
Aliona: I try to. Actually, I speak fast, I could speak slower for you to understand more of that, but I also have no idea about your level in Ukrainian.
Vic: I don’t think… (laughs)
Aliona: I think it’s pretty, I think it’s pretty high and just you kinda… and because I don’t have you… I don’t give you a chance to speak Ukrainian with me because I’m speaking English to you, that is why, which is why I don’t know, eh, and, yeah. But in the kitchen it’s good that you have chance to practice, uh, and you, I hope you understand people, but lots of them speak russian…
Vic: Yeah. It’s, uh…
Aliona: But you, like, do you, uh, are you on that level that you can separate what’s russian word, what’s Ukrainian?
Vic: Mm, not really, I can read things a lot better than I can, like, listen to them spoken, because a lot of people speak very quickly, um…
Aliona: Yeah.
Vic: I find it easier to understand people from Kyiv and also Kharkiv than Lviv, and um, someone told me that she thinks it’s because they previously spoke russian, now they’re making more of an effort to speak Ukrainian, they’re pronouncing it better because it’s, like, new to them. Versus people in Lviv, they can speak shitty Ukrainian, ‘cause… (laughs)
Aliona: No, it’s not that they speak shitty Ukrainian, it’s that, uh, I can explain that phenomenon… eh, people who live near the border, they always speak, you know, that kind of mixture of their language and it’s, and it happens everywhere, the same, like, in different parts of UK, you can hear very different language, and oh my God, even, I suppose, even in England you can have, you can hear very different English.
Vic: Yes.
Aliona: And some people from the UK, I really, it’s really good that I understand you. You also speak very clear, and I really appreciate that ‘cause some people from the UK, I’m struggling to understand them, with, no matter how I try. But this follows so many letters and words and intonation is kinda different, and I was like… I really do try, and I, I need to practice listening, eh, a lot, but I really… I’m really struggling with, eh, with that. So in Ukrainian it’s the same that people, it’s not that we really don’t understand people from Lviv, or people from Lviv or Zakarpattia region don’t understand people from, eh, Kyiv, but in Zakarpattia region, for example, because they live so close to Hungary, and… So… when I was there, in Uzhhorod… some people, I, I could barely understand because they spoke so fast, and it was still Ukrainian but lots of Hungarian words or some words they screwed up, with some endings, and intonation is also different, so when they speak fast to you, they also, you probably know this… words with «-ся» in the end.
Vic: Hmm. Reflexive.
Aliona: Like, reflec… like, reflexive. So they put this «-ся» in front of word, which is very old-fashioned thing!
Vic: Oh. Okay.
Aliona: So you can find that somewhere in poetry or some in the, let’s say, 19, 18 century literature. And you understand what that mean but people never speak like, here like that, ‘cause it’s very old-fashioned, it’s like, you know, like, old English.
Vic: Yeah.
Aliona: So… so when, one man, and it was, uh, on the… when it was… oh, it was on Christmas, and one man, uh, just said to me «Христос ся рождає» or something like that, and it was very fast and I really didn’t understand what he said, and then I, I realized that he said «Jesus was born», the, it’s Ukrainian wish you tell people on Christmas, like «Jesus was born» [«Христос народився»] and other people reply «Let’s glorify him» [«Славімо його»]. It’s not very common but some people do that, but because he said, uh, that very fast and with that specific intonation and he said «ся рождає» instead of «народжується»…
Vic: Yeah, that’s…
Aliona: So it was old-fashioned form and it was, like, backwards, that «-ся» was in front of, and like… like, God… he’s like, from 17 or 18 century? But he was real, he was [an] old man, but real man. And, yeah. So I was struggling a little bit, and some people who live in Carpathians, because they live in the ve, like, in the mountains in very small villages, and they got to hear what they, uh what they hear from people around, so, some hutsuls [гуцули], they speak, like, you can barely understand them. Because of their intonation, because of word order, because, also, Polish has a big influence on them, ‘cause in Polish, intonation is different, and also they use lots of, eh, dialect words, which denote things, we just don’t have them in Kyiv. So for example, in, they have sheeps and they are shepherds, they have some specific names of sheeps, specific names for the sheep, eh, for wool, specific names for stuff they deal with, so they have the dialect word which are not just… general words…
Vic: All precise.
Aliona: …but for all precise about their handcrafts they made, and because we don’t deal with sheeps here in Kyiv, we just don’t have that stuff they deal with, so we just not have the word. So we can say the same about, let’s say, like, fishmen somewhere in Polissia region, because they have lots of rivers and lakes, so they have some specific, uh, specific stuff, that’s why they name it somehow, and because we don’t deal with that, I have no idea what that specific stuff is called. Also they have their word for some, uh, so, Ukrainian word for rooster, and their…
Vic: півень [piven].
Aliona: Piven, but they call it «когут».
Vic: Okay.
Aliona: So some… they’re just different word. They would understood piven, but they would call it когут. And the dialects, they live only on the level of speech, cause of course they know Ukrainian, but they speak, like, they know this general Ukrainian, everyone goes to school and you have internet, you have television, that’s why it’s so interesting that people still use that word, uh, in their speech, but it anyway, it kinda dies.
So when I was at university and I had like dialectology practic, it’s not that they went somewhere and they recorded speech of old grannies, but there were, vocab… eh, dictionaries of dialects made by people who really made the expreditions, so they went to the very far villages and talked to very old people who lived all their life in that closed small villages, and that people spoke exactly that Ukrainian they heard around, cause they didn’t have television, they could barely have radio. So while ago, let’s say century ago, even less that century ago, cause you don’t move and you don’t have the diversity of language, you just speak what you heard from your parents, from your, from people around you, and they recorded that interesting, not, uh… tails, legends and just version of word, cause you can have different versions of, lets say, word «bicycle» all around Ukraine.
Vic: Yes.
Aliona: And everyone knows it’s «велосипед», but…
Vic: Someone told me it’s a russian word, so I shouldn’t say «велосипед».
Aliona: I’d, eh, I think… it does not sound like Ukrainian word, and I would, I could just show you, um…
Vic: Yeah I think that’s one you get in Europe. In Spanish, it’s a bit… they have «bicicleta»… yeah…
Aliona: I want to show you that map about, like, you can make a world map, um…
Vic: Yeah, there’s a friend in Lviv, like his brother has a comic book shop, and he was showing me the shop, and they have like comics in Ukrainian, and I was like «I’ll buy some for when my Ukrainian is better», and there was one with really beautiful art, and he was like «Nooo, you can’t, don’t, don’t even try», because it was, um, about Carpathian folklore, and it was written in the dialect, and my friend who lives in Lviv was like «Even I can’t read that», so… (laughs) Yeah….
Aliona: I… want to show you that… oh yeah.
Vic: Yeah, I just kind of pick up words from wherever, so sometimes I pick up russian words on accident.
Aliona: It happens a lot… yeah. So for example, lots of, eh, lots of people use «ровер», which is…
Vic: Hmm. That’s for bicycle.
Aliona: …which is from the UK.
Vic: Rover?
Aliona: Yeah!
Vic: To mean «bicycle»?
Aliona: So, so it says here. Oh, it’s what’s name of company! Settled in 1887…
Vic: Oh, Rover! They make cars, I think.
Aliona: Yeah. Yeah. So they ma… so they made bicycles and that’s why usual… it was… so it was like «wander around, find adventures», so rover, it’s someone who’s wandering around…
Vic: Oh! To rove. Okay.
Aliona: …and so they made the name for that company and… and they, so you know when proper name becomes common name, like Pampers?
Vic: Yeah, Google.
Aliona: Google, and diesel, and stuff like that.
Vic: Yeah. Okay.
Aliona: So if you, if you look at this…
Vic: Oh, it shows you what the…
Aliona: It shows you, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. It’s… I wish we could look closer than that… but so it’s, general word is «велосипед», but it can be «ровер», it can be even, pet, it’s diminutive from [«ровер»] «роверко». It’s like, when you’re, like, you’re rove a lot. In uh, this region, in Zakarpattia region, it’s «біциглі», which has nothing in common with «ровер» here.
Vic: It’s bicycle.
Aliona: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people here use… so, not «велосипед» but «вел» or «вело», just short of…
Vic: I think I’ve heard…
Aliona: Yeah, «вело». And also «велік» or «гоцик», also «ровер», also… «лісапєд», so it’s from «велосипед», it’s kinda, you just cut the first part and have this «лісапєд». Or «вєласіпєд», so this all possible phonetic options of that… and also «байк».
Vic: Okay.
Aliona: So people all sorts of… and, uh… here, «веломашина». So it’s like, velo… velocar. Velocar. And… eh, or here, it’s also «драндулєт», and «драндулєт» is all something, like, when it, imagine you have a car and it’s very, very old, and you’re like «Oh my God, you’re old disaster» so it’s «драндулєт». When it breaks every 5 minute and you need to repair it.
Vic: Okay.
Aliona: So… we could make up something like that. So it’s… different in different regions, and it’s really, and I think it’s really cool. But I think with matter of time Ukrainian, because… we have this international space and everyone has education and we have television, ah, so the dialects, they really… disappear.
Vic: Hmm.
Aliona: So, eh, that word which people used, interesting word, interesting intonations or some, sometimes it’s completely different word. Sometimes it’s word with other ending or with other letter or without some letters. Sometimes it’s just, like, screwed up pronunciation of word. Sometimes it’s the same word but meaning can be a little bit wider, a little bit… a little bit more narrow. Eh, we’re losing that, I think many languages are losing that because of… we have, uh, like one space, and, eh, people are travel around, so they pick up Ukrainian from other places as well, so it becomes less common and… Sadly, one day that old interesting dialect word, they probably will be only… only in dictionaries, in dialects, eh, dictionaries. But, um… but, yeah.
If you get to, like, even if you go to Lviv and you live in Lviv couple of days, like I felt that on myself. You then start sounding like them. It’s not that you use other language, you just kinda pick up the intonation, cause they make it higher in the end of the sentence, I don’t know why. I think it’s something to do with Polish language. So they have this different intonation in the end of sentence, and then you go back to Kyiv and you hear how you sound comparing to other people in Kyiv, like… «Oh my God, I sound like a person from Lviv». But then it all kinda being erased in couple of days. So it happened to me several times.
And also they use for the same words, they can use different emphasis, that’s why maybe you understand them worse. Cause… let’s say we have pronounce «мій, моЯ, моЄ, моЇ», you know, «твій, твоЯ, твоЄ, твоЇ». So, in West part of Ukraine, they would say «мОя, мОє, мОї». «ТвОя, твОє, твОї». If, next time you’re there, you just pay attention and you will definitely, you will definitely hear that. And it’s not that, and, proper, proper emphasis is how do we speak, like, to have emphasis in the end. But they put it, they make it on the first, eh, on the first syllable. Also for some words, like, let’s say «роблЮ, люблЮ, ходжУ» they would say, «я лЮблю, я хОджу, я рОблю», so they just…
Vic: Hmm, yeah.
Aliona: They transfer the emphasis to another… to another syllable. So they’re the most, lets say, recognizable, eh, recognizable differences. Yeah. But it’s… it’s really, it’s really interesting. Okay. Now I’m not telling you the other stories (Vic laughs) and going back to what I told about russian warship. Okay.
Vic: Yeah. So, with, um, with that, do you think it made swearing more acceptable in general or… was it just that phrase became, like, more normalized?
Aliona: Eh, I think it was like a wave, which… mmm… kinda normalized swearing. If you swear, if you use swearing words to russians, it was kinda normalized. Then, like waves on the riverside, it all kinda went back, cause now I don’t think we would have that big poster and that big billboard, or we would have would have something like that, but you know, with the «stars» [asterisks]. On the place, like…
Vic: Yeah.
Aliona: … «go fuck yourself». We would have that stars again. And, eh, so it was a moment when people, eh, were so frustrated, and actually I think no one controlled it, a lot, so there was no, uh… it was when all taboos were kinda erased, and also beca… because this phrase was like, everyone heard that story, everyone knew that phrase, for Ukrainians it meant much more than just, uh… going [telling] someone to go and fuck themselves, it was said to russians, it was said by Ukrainian military, it was said in the situation when that military actually had a choice of «you can become a prisoner of war, you can… eh… put down your arms and just surrender», but instead of that, knowing that he might die, he just said: «Go fuck yourself!».
So it’s, it was a story for us about… even if there’s no choice, it seems like there’s no choice or you, you always have a choice. And if, even if you’re… one and you didn’t have a weapon, oh my God, swearing will be your weapon! (Vic laughs) So, at some point swearing became our weapon and became part of, uh… resilience. That’s why I think Ukrainians used it a lot and it became a symbol of resilience. So… we kinda… it was not blasphemy, at that moment. (laughs)
Vic: But then now it shifted a bit more again, people do…?
Aliona: If shifted, yeah. It shifted a bit more, it became popular to have some shirt with this, Ukr… eh, russian warship and stuff like that and all the post marks. Now I think, like, I don’t see people around wearing the stuff like that. So it were, like… if people have it, they keep it more like souvenir. If people have that marks, no one wants to just show them to, eh, everyone. So it’s more like… would you treat it more like heritage of war?
And also, it has, I think, it has something to do with, eh, the fact that at the first period you had nowhere to go with your anxiety with your, um, frustration, with your anger, now because we live in the war four years, now it is more than four years, we have something to do with it. You can join the military, you can volunteer, you can, uh, talk about it with someone, you just get used to war, so… swearing, it’s not that it will really help you. You can, you have some uh, you can be productive any other way, so you can do other things than just, other than just swearing and swearing. It helps you to release your emotions, but it does not make victory closer. So now we prefer, we can still swear as like, swear and then go and volunteer. You can swear and volunteer. And do something really helpful.
Vic: Think the ladies at the kitchen would not like it if I started swearing there… Although I heard some. (laughs)
Aliona: You… I think you heard some very color, colorful stuff with Olia. It’s actually like, it’s… the swearing, we cannot say they’re just Ukrainian swearing or just russian swearing, or common Slavic swearing, and, uh… yeah. Olia, Olia likes to swear a lot. So when Olia says «піздец»…
Vic: Yeah.
Aliona: It’s not, it’s, it might be not exactly about someone, it just her emotion, how she pictures the situation. So… situation in the kie, in the kitchen is often «піздец». Or when she says «піздец» and then someone’s name, (laughs) someone made something wrong. But also it’s what’s interesting about swearing in general. When you swear, eh, it can be emotional, like you just kinda release your emotions and you probably know that eh, it’s really scientifically proved that if you feel pain, for example you burn yourself and if you let yourself to swear, you feel less pain than if you just keep silent and you just… silently suffer. So it helps to release some pain of some that emotions.
And also if you swear at someone, you kinda know who can you use swear words to and what can you say. Cause there are some exact people, Olia can do that, but if I do the same bad thing, Olia would not swear at me. So you always, you don’t do that with everyone and you kinda the pick, pick the situation. And it’s also in, really interesting that uh… cause I was reading about that and I was thinking about that, why so often we swear at language which is not our native language? Cause, like we don’t feel it that deep, so if I often would sa, when something bad happens to me, I would rather say «fuck» or «shit» than that Slavic swearing, cause Slavic swearing, swearing, I perfectly know and I feel that it’s… for me it’s really deep as for native speaker, so I would feel like «Okay, I said that, I felt that release, but I also did something wrong». When I say it in English, because it’s not my native language, I don’t feel all deepness. Like I said that, I have an excuse that I felt that, like… I’ve made myself easier in that, but I also didn’t feel, eh… like I made something really bad. Just because I don’t feel how deep it is.
Vic: Mhm.
Aliona: Eh… so I really hear often that, like, some of my students, they come to me and they like «Look how beautiful I say блять» (laughs) or something like that. And they say that and they really enjoy it cause they feel like they do something… like they do something, they react on what happens, for example air [raid] alert, but at the same time they can shock people around, but they don’t feel that they really did something bad.
Vic: Right.
Aliona: Because they don’t feel the deepness of it. So it’s really funny how, like, lets say, me and my friend, we hear air [raid] alert and he’s American and I’m Ukrainian so he says «блять» and I say «fuck!».
Vic: (laughs)
Aliona: So yeah. That’s, that’s interesting, eh… thing. And it’s common to swear, well, to u… to use not your native language when you’re swearing.
Vic: Yeah, I think I’ve started saying «блять».
Aliona: Yeah. Yeah. And it sticks so well, and it’s, like, swearing, it’s emotional reaction and it’s not that you really pick a word. Something happens to you and you just react. So if your first react is that word, which is not your native language, like, why am I doing that? I was thinking about that. Why am I doing that? Like, maybe beca… when I’m surrounded by, by English native speakers, for them to understand my swearing better, but not, I do that when I’m alone!
Vic: Mmm.
Aliona: And I do that in English, why? So it’s like, is English just… has that much influence on you that you rea, reacting in English? Not in your native language. Yeah. That, that’s interesting. Our brain just, eh, an amazing thing.
Vic: A taxi driver earlier kept saying «блін», which, I, I enjoy. Like, pancake.
Aliona: So… yeah, yeah! And, so its «pancake» in russian, but we also can use that, so, you know, kids, they’re not allowed to say that.
Vic: Yeah, yeah, so they… (laughs)
Aliona: Cause, like, if my daughter say that, I would be, I would look at her like «Hey, woman! Don’t do that» (laughs), and, yeah. That’s why I say «блін», I also remember saying that when I was a child, and also we have this word, so, there is «піздец» and there is also «капец». And «капец» is kinda light version of «піздец».
Vic: «Капец».
Aliona: «Капец». Yeah. So «капец» is like… it’s like kaput.
Vic: Ohh…
Aliona: So it’s like.. the end. Situation is, like, bad. Or when we say that… «комусь капец» or like… «тобі капец», if you’re threatening to someone, like… kaput to you! I will finish you! Or something like that. So yeah, it’s also, it’s also interesting that really deep swearing, they usually have, like, lighter version or light version which would be appropriate also to say, uh, like, for children. So with some people you would use «блять», or with some people you would just say «блін» or «капец».
Vic: Mmm.
Aliona: Not to… not to put them into shock. Yeah.
Vic: Yeah, we’re nearly at 3… oh, we are at 3.
Aliona: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay.
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