Like I say, TV and the Internet have killed the Southern accent in Texas and will shortly do the same with all but about a dozen of our present languages.
Man in the street type interviews you see from Ukraine are all in Russian and not Ukrainian. Anybody in Ukraine who isn't retarded speaks Russian now and eveen the retards will have it in another five years.
“Man in the street type interviews you see from Ukraine are all in Russian and not Ukrainian.”
For decades, the Soviet Union leadership actively promoted Russian as the primary language across the USSR and controlled territories. It started to change after 1975, when Russia signed up to the Helsinki agreement and by the 80s regional languages like Ukrainian were not as actively suppressed.
The USSR decentralised in the 80s and the Soviet Socialist Republics had even more flexibility;that’s why, when the USSR finally disbanded, the borders of Ukraine and Belarus were easily ported into the new borders of independent nation states instead of them being regions of Russia.
The Ukrainians living in my county (some have been in England for 20 years while others are refugees) are from Donetsk, Zaporozhzhia and Khmelnychchyna. They ALL speak Russian as a first language and some speak Ukrainian as a second language. They have Netflix in Russian and Ukrainian, with Russian providing far more content than Ukrainian. Does it make them pro Russian? Of course not.
The advancement of the Ukrainian language IN OFFICIALDOM is a nationalist push - Poroshenko put it into policy and one of his last acts of office before Zelenskyy took over was to promote Ukrainian AND delegitimize Russian as an official state language.
But the idea this was ever going to exterminate the Russian language OUTSIDE OF officialdom is laughable, hyperbolic, paranoid Russian propaganda.
It’s never worked that way. Decades of the Soviet Union suppressing Ukrainian language didn’t kill it off. Centuries of England suppressing Welsh didn’t kill it off.
Most Welsh nationalists outside of seriously rural areas speak Welsh AND English fluently. Welsh comes first as the promoted language, English comes first when communicating to the wider world.
And us English are 90% fine with that. Both languages are great for different things. We don’t want to kill Welsh off anymore; it’s unnecessary.
Russia projects its own prejudices. It wants to kill off Ukrainian separateness and that means terminating the language. It therefore can’t tell the difference between a political gesture that promotes minority Ukrainian over majority Russian, and cultural genocide.
The Texas situation you talk about is an organic shift. The same happened here where I live; 50 years ago you would’ve needed subtitles to understand Broad Yorkshire accents and dialect. Now, Yorkshire speakers have only a slight accent. We can blame TV and radio for it. But it isn’t cultural genocide, it’s just evolution.