Language attitudes in the mass media: What attitude towards the Ukrainian language was formed by the Odesa media (2014–2023)

Abstract

Summary The article examines the issue of the representation of language attitudes in mass media texts. The focus is on the attitude towards the Ukrainian language manifested in the texts of Odesa online publications during 2014–2023. Content analysis of the popular internet publications of Odesa has been chosen as the main method of research. We focused on mass media materials that mentioned the concepts of “The Ukrainian language” and “The Russian language”. More than 700 media texts were analyzed in total. The research enabled us to identify the main models of attitudes towards the Ukrainian language in the analyzed media through the dichotomy of ‘ours – theirs’, which changed both in intensity and content. Conditionally, we can identify the date of the change in this dichotomy as the beginning of the large-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine. During 2014–2021, a trend of ambivalent attitudes. After February 24, 2022, the language-based dichotomy ‘ours – theirs’ has changed its expressive power and clearly fixed its objects: as a rule, the Ukrainian language has become ‘ours’, whilst Russian – ‘theirs’. This, in its turn, has led to the displacement of negative evaluation rhetoric regarding the Ukrainian language in all the analyzed media. It was due to the political situation in the country and the change in many values of Ukrainians during the war.