Nationalities Papers
473
(the Basque party Herri Batasuna as "the voice of those who have no voice in Europe",
p. 159).
My overall impression of this book is positive. The comparative approach has been
underused in studies of the political history of the Caucasus. Sabanadze lays the ground-
work and deconstructs some of the key concepts for future work in this direction. Her case
study of Georgian nationalism draws on Georgian-language sources, including some hard-
to-find periodicals, which are inaccessible to many foreign commentators. The book is
attractively bound and printed, but the syntactic and lexical infelicities cropping up here
and there in the text indicate that the manuscript should have been looked over one last
time by a proofreader.
Kevin Tuite
Universite de Montreal/Friedrich-Schiller-Universitiit lena
tuitekj @ anthro. umontreal. ca
© 2011, Kevin Tuite
Language policy and language situation in Ukraine. Analysis and recommendations,
ed. by Juliane Besters-Dilger, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der
Wissenschaften, 2009, 396 pp., US$81.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-3631583890
The language situation in post-Soviet Ukraine remains among the most misunderstood,
misconstrued, and muddled aspects in the recent scholarship of that country. The
reasons for this state of affairs include an often uncritical reproduction of both Soviet
and Western stereotypical (western Ukraine vs. eastern; Catholic west vs Orthodox rest
of the nation, Ukrainian and Russian as mutually comprehensible languages, etc.) views
by researchers, difficulty in collecting statistically reliable data in a situation of post-
imperial trauma when potential informants give pollsters what they think the latter want
to hear, interpretation of data outside its historical, cultural, and socio-psychological
context, and a continued lack of sufficient command of the language by non-Ukrainian
researchers. Many western scholars still think that knowledge of Russian is sufficient
for them to do research, interview informants and pass conclusions.
The book under review is a collection of nine essays by Ukrainian and Western scho-
lars focusing on the language situation in Ukraine both in its internal dimension and
viewed in terms of international practices limited to Western democracies and precedents
where its contributors deem them applicable to or comparable with the case of Ukraine.
The language situation in that country is discussed on a general national scale as well
as in a number of more specific domains: regional (Odesa), sociolinguistic (surzhyk),
and socio-political (education, mass media, government administration and courts). The
analytical tools are drawn from five disciplines represented by the book's contributors:
political science, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology and jurisprudence.
Chronologically the book is limited to the years immediately following the Orange
Revolution of 2004. The declared goal of the book is to discuss language situation in
all the mentioned aspects and articulate a set of policy recommendations for Ukraine.
Even though Ukrainian policy-makers are apparently targeted as the primary audience
of this collective monograph, it is an even more valuable resource for scholars of post-
modern Ukraine as well as of other countries in a postcolonial transition, not because of
the dismissive treatment of science by politicians in Ukraine but primarily for a wealth
of very interesting material it offers in its descriptive part.