Until the point when I met a Ukrainian woman, with whom I then lived together for quite a while, I didn't know that Ukrainian women, when they speak Russian, sometimes use Ukrainian words — for example “doch”. I thought “doch” was a Russian word too. And I was also very astonished when I first travelled to Kyiv in 1999 and found that Ukrainian was officially the language there. But people also spoke Russian, and sometimes on television one person would speak Ukrainian and the other would answer in Russian. So both languages coexisted, quite peacefully.
And I think it's a tremendous achievement that Ukraine managed to restore and preserve its national language, its state language — because every year we lose several hundred languages. They die out, and they never come back. And that's a tragedy, because not even AI can bring a language back. That's why it's so good that they managed it — the Ukrainians, preserving Ukrainian and reviving it — unlike with Belarusian, unlike in Belarus, where Belarusian, I think, is acutely threatened with extinction and probably won't survive, like many other Slavic languages, such as Rusyn.
So there are, or there used to be, many Slavic languages that have meanwhile sadly gone extinct. That's why I'm very glad that Ukraine has succeeded in preserving its mother tongue.
What do you think about putting together a specific language test for Ukrainians living in Germany — because these people need to improve their Ukrainian too? Sooner or later they'll have to go home, and then they'll need Ukrainian. We could develop a special test that quizzes vocabulary, words and phrases that exist in Ukrainian but have German roots, or that sound similar to German words — for example “смак” (smak), taste — in German “Geschmack”; in Russian it's “вкус” (vkus), completely different. “Дах” (dakh), roof — in German “Dach”; in Russian “крыша” (krysha), and so on. We could research that, find materials — I think that could be worthwhile.
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