Comments by "1midnightfish" (@1midnightfish) on "Украина, на скольких языках ты говоришь? | Уличные интервью" video.

russians really are like a nasty ex who just can't accept she's moved on and doesn't want / need / like him anymore (not that she ever did)
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@kadovax6567 I'm not agreeing with the troll but would just like to point out that English very much is an imperial language, historically... just as Latin was, a long time ago. That's how these languages became international languages in their respective eras. The Irish language, for example, was almost completely wiped out by English imperialism over the course of a couple of centuries. However with regards to Ukraine, anglophone imperialism doesn't come into it because English is not being imposed on people the way russian has been over the centuries: it is a language that Ukrainians themselves want to learn so they can communicate with the parts of the world they're interested in communicating with.
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 @Елена-ь3о1щ Actually your defensive reply is just a confirmation that the analogy I made fairly accurately reflects the situation
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@qwazse4 Except that if a language has spread to various parts of the world by way of imperialist practices, then it's absolutely rational and correct to define that language as "imperialist"
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@qwazse4 Arabic is indeed an imperialist language, no one has at any point in this thread claimed that English is the only one in existence. And English does spread by way of arts and culture, but in reality it is anglophone arts and culture that spread on the back of the imperialist English language - often, historically, at the expense of the cultural output of other nations and languages. Which is, incidentallly, what has been done to the Ukrainian language and cultural output over the centuries, through the russophone cultural output of "the temporary misunderstanding currently known as the russian federation" (to quote Sternenko, a prominent ukrainian blogger). It will never bee too late to decolonise anglophone literature and arts, but more importantly, an automatically defensive stance about the imperialist function of the English language is holding many of us back from dissecting and neutralising the role of russian language and culture in enabling, promoting and to an extent foreshadowing the horrors currently being perpetrated by russia in Ukraine, with the overwhelmingly negative effects on the rest of the world.
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