Languages rise and fall with history, in nations and university language departments alike. In 1980, when Roman Koropeckyj stepped into his classroom at Harvard to teach Polish, he was "gobsmacked" by the dozens of students awaiting him. The Polish trade unionists of the Solidarity movement, who were defying Soviet oppression on the opposite side of the planet, had inspired Americans to learn.
Another one of those linguistic flashpoints arrived in February, when Ukraine's staunch resistance to a massive Russian invasion drew admirers around the world. The Ukrainian language hasn't been taught at UCLA's department of Slavic East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures "in a number of years" due a lack of demand, said Koropeckyj, a professor in the department. He and a Ukrainian-born colleague told the department chair it might be time to teach Ukrainian again.
"There are moments in recent history where you see this massive uptick in learning language because language is in the news," Koropeckyj said, predicting heightened interest in Ukrainian "for the foreseeable future." Not only that, the unpopularity of the invasion "might change the way people go to study Slavic languages, and Russian may have lost the cachet that it's had up until now for decades."
