Guardian writer's Ukrainian lessons reveal a vocabulary shaped by war
Guardian chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins began learning Ukrainian after visits to the country, and her lessons showed how the war has reshaped everyday language. She discusses this in a new podcast conversation with Helen Pidd.
Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian's chief culture writer, says her encounters with Ukrainian artists, novelists and poets living under wartime conditions convinced her to start learning the Ukrainian language. She had made up her mind even before returning home from one of her trips to Ukraine.
Back in London, she began weekly lessons with Olha Makar, a teacher who was living in western Ukraine at the time and fit in tutoring around her work helping displaced teenagers. Higgins wanted not only to be able to get around the country practically, but also to eventually read Ukrainian poetry in the original.
A vocabulary marked by war
Higgins explains that learning a language like Italian typically means picking up words for restaurants, ice cream or landmarks. Learning Ukrainian involved much of that too, but also a great deal connected to sorrow — words for drone, rocket, air raid alarm and bomb shelter became part of her everyday vocabulary. The war, she says, coloured almost everything she learned.
Four years and several trips to Ukraine later, Higgins still remembers how Olha first introduced herself in Ukrainian, saying that before the war she had lived in Kyiv, loved the city, and wanted to live there again. For Higgins, that single introductory sentence carried a deep sense of sorrow — even in the first phrase they shared, there was already an acknowledgment of displacement and a longing to return home.
