Analysts here and abroad have long predicted growing ethnic tension between Ukrainian nationalists in the West and ethnic Russians in the East and Crimea. Ukrainians appear to be fairly comfortable with not one but two functional national languages. The survey confirmed that, despite its relegation to non-official status after the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, Russian remains the primary spoken language in Ukraine. The proportion of respondents who said they spoke Russian at home outnumbered those who said they spoke Ukrainian at home by a ratio of 3 to 2. The high number of bilingual households may be partly explained by the use of mixed Ukrainian-Russian dialects.
Younger people are considerably more likely to speak Russian.
People in their 30s were most likely to speak Ukrainian, with 36 percent saying they speak it at home. That figure fell to 29 percent among people aged 50 and over and to 24 percent among people aged 15 to 19. Younger people are also more likely to favor recognizing the Russian language legally. Among teenagers, 46.4 percent favored making Russian a state language, while 41.4 percent of those in their 20s favored the same, 40.1 percent of people in the 30s, 40.2 percent of people in their 40s, and just 37.3 percent of people aged 50 and over.