The Politics of Language Choice: How the Russian-Ukrainian War Influences Ukrainians' Language Use on Twitter

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 4 million geo-tagged tweets to understand how the Russian-Ukrainian War influenced Ukrainians' language choices on Twitter, revealing a significant shift from Russian to Ukrainian language use driven by behavioral changes.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale quantitative analysis of language choice dynamics among Ukrainians on social media during the war, disentangling sample effects from behavioral effects.

Findings

A steady pre-war shift from Russian to Ukrainian language use.

A rapid increase in Ukrainian language tweets following the war outbreak.

More than half of Russian-language users switched to Ukrainian during the conflict.

Abstract

The use of language is innately political and often a vehicle of cultural identity as well as the basis for nation building. Here, we examine language choice and tweeting activity of Ukrainian citizens based on more than 4 million geo-tagged tweets from over 62,000 users before and during the Russian-Ukrainian War, from January 2020 to October 2022. Using statistical models, we disentangle sample effects, arising from the in- and outflux of users on Twitter, from behavioural effects, arising from behavioural changes of the users. We observe a steady shift from the Russian language towards the Ukrainian language already before the war, which drastically speeds up with its outbreak. We attribute these shifts in large part to users' behavioural changes. Notably, we find that more than half of the Russian-tweeting users shift towards Ukrainian as a result of the war.