Thursday, August 03, 2006

First language

A couple of months ago, there was a lot of debate in Ukraine about which language should be the primary; Ukrainian or Russian. The difference between those two is not that significant in my opinion. But in Ukraine this question, as almost every other question, divides the country in two.

The fact is that everybody speaks Russian, more than half speaks both Russian and Ukrainian and very few speak English.

In my opinion, the most important question is not what the first language should be – just vote for it and get it over with – the question is what the second language should be: English or Chinese?

With the global economy and all, I think Ukraine should start figuring out how the world is going to communicate with them. We Danes have known the importance of that for centuries. I mean, we are doing pretty good even with limited resources and a language nobody knows or cares about (except for us Danes of course).

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