The philologist called Ukraine's attempt to appropriate Kolobok linguistic nationalism

The attempt by the Ukrainian side to "win back" the word and the fairy tale "Kolobok" from Russia is linguistic nationalism. On April 26, Valery Mokienko, Professor of the Department of Slavic Philology at the Faculty of Philology and chief Researcher at the Institute of Philological Research, told Izvestia.

Accordingly, he commented on the message of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine on the Facebook social network (owned by Meta, whose activities are recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) about the proof of the true roots of the folk tale "Kolobok".

"To be honest, this is not the first time I have encountered such attempts. I call such attempts linguistic nationalism, because the name of the food, the name of the clothes, or even some abstract word like conscience is declared either purely Ukrainian, purely Polish, or purely Russian. No matter who does it, it always smells like nationalism," he said.

According to the philologist, the example of the "gingerbread man" is typical and demonstrates an attempt to "compete for a sticker" about belonging. He stressed that the word itself is known to Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and almost all Slavs know the fairy tale — both southern, western, and eastern.

Mokienko noted that the most vulnerable are people who claim that "kolobok" is Ukrainian because of the presence of the word "kolo" in the vocabulary of the language. At the same time, the philologist stressed that this word cannot be called exclusively Ukrainian.

On April 4, the head of the Verkhovna Rada's Education Committee, Sergei Babak, announced the impossibility of banning the Russian language in Ukrainian schools, as it violates European Union norms. According to him, the ban may be perceived as a discriminatory measure, which will have a negative impact on the process of Ukraine's accession to the bloc.