Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has signed a decree to strengthen the role of the Ukrainian language, the presidential press service said in a statement.
“Staring from 2018 we are launching the decade of the Ukrainian language—we will do our utmost to protect the language,” Poroshenko said.
According to the statement, the decree stipulates that in the next decade, the government will carry out a series of measures aimed at ensuring the comprehensive development and functioning of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of public life. The plan is to “improve the level of teaching of the national language in the educational institutions, to facilitate the process of learning the Ukrainian language for foreigners, to develop distance and online courses on the Ukrainian language, to introduce certification exam in the Ukrainian language for those who applied for Ukrainian citizenship.”
The decree also envisages the creation of conditions for ensuring citizens’ rights to receive information in Ukrainian, including through mass media and advertising, the statement said.
In the meantime, the decree lays legal grounds for the protection of the rights of the country’s minorities, whose mother tongue is not Ukrainian, it said.
About 65-70% of Ukrainians consider Ukrainian as their first language.
