The Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine (Ministry of Culture) is working on a legislative initiative to give the English language a special status in Ukraine. Rostislav Karandeev, First Deputy Minister of Culture, stated this at the briefing.
The government official argued that currently only one law on education contains a reference to Art. 10 of the Constitution and English as the language of international communication, that is why an interdepartmental working group was created to prepare a new comprehensive project of the law. The initiative is designed to help Ukrainian society master the English language and become “full-fledged subjects of mutual relations in all world markets.
Currently, Ukraine ranks only 40th out of 112 countries in the world in terms of the level of English language proficiency of its citizens, while the real indicators, according to a government official, are even worse. And the transformation of the status of the English language should solve this problem.
“This is Ukraine’s strategic course towards EU membership. The draft law provides for the regulation of the use of the English language in certain public spheres of social life. First of all, it concerns international communications.
The project is a certain declaration that will fix the position of the state regarding the English language and the vision, which will additionally need to be done in separate plans and programs.”
At the same time, the deputy minister emphasized that none of the provisions of the draft law on the status of the English language will and cannot be interpreted as aimed at restricting the use of the Ukrainian language.
Currently, the project is at an early stage — in fact, there is only an idea. How the granting of a special status to the English language will affect and what spheres of life it will affect, we can only guess at the moment. It can be recalled that at one time the Ministry of Education and Culture was going to make knowledge of English a mandatory condition for admission to higher education institutions until 2023, and it can be assumed that the role of the English language will grow in this way after giving it a special status — it will be included in the school curriculum as a second foreign language and will be promoted by teaching individual programs of choice at universities.
The Secretary of the NSDC Danilov advocated the transition of Ukraine to the Latin script and learning English from kindergarten.
