Two languages, one mouth
I grew up speaking Russian at school and Ukrainian at home. This was not unusual in Kharkiv in the 1990s. The two languages lived side by side in my head, occasionally borrowing from each other, never quite separating.
My grandmother called this surzhyk and disapproved. My mother called it normal.
Language is not a flag. It is a river — it flows where the ground allows.
When the border moved
After 2014, and especially after 2022, the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian shifted from coexistence to confrontation. Friends who had spoken Russian their entire lives switched to Ukrainian overnight — not because they didn't know it, but because the political weight of each word had changed.
I understood. I did the same.
What is lost
The loss is not linguistic — both languages are rich and beautiful and will survive. The loss is the space between them: the jokes that only work if you know both, the songs that switch mid-verse, the family arguments where everyone is speaking a different language and nobody notices.
That space was home. I don't know if it still exists.