I had a dream, in which some prominent russian-speaking figures visited my home. And I was a Ukrainian agent (like spy or something like that), who masked himself. And I tried to speak Russian. Funny thing is that it took me a tremendous effort, and I had Ukrainian words slipping into my speech quite constantly.
Since that was a dream, nobody cared, obviously. Yet, I’ve been paying attention to my mistakes.
In the real world, there won’t be a tremendous effort on my part, I assume. Yet, it would take me some effort at first, to rememeber Russian language back again. E.g. a couple of days ago, I noticed that I don’t know how to properly say something in Russian.
In Ukrainian language, many things are formulated differently, they have different propositions, and even the same words have different forms. There are many words that are just written differently depending on the meaning, while in Russian they’re written the same. E.g. there are some situation when a verb and a noun are just written differently.
There was a phrase in my head, and I realised it’s Ukrainian way of formulating it. In Russian, it would sound mostly the same, but some minor details would be different for proper Russian language. Honestly, wtf is the proper one? Moscow, I guess. There’s no other city that is theirs anyway.
I won’t recall the exact phrase right now, but I also couldn’t recall what that phrase would sound in this proper russian. Russian language differs in Ukraine, Belarus, and some parts of Russia that I visited too. As much as English differs widely. If I’d be a spy covering for some operation, this phrase could even uncover me, if the lister would be attentive enough to notice.
I woke up (from an Air Raid Siren, at about 2–3 am) puzzled about this dream.
If I’d ever travel to Russia (I never plan to do that on my own free will), I’d surely speak Russian there. Well, there’s no other option, they speak no other language. But if I’d travel to Belarus (which I may plan to do at some point of my life), I’d surely speak Russian there too, as unfortunately, it’s not too safe to speak Belarussian in modern-day Belarus. As much as it might be not safe to speak Ukrainian on Russia-occupied territories.
Tecnhically, Belarus is occupied by Russians, too. It’s just that this occupation is much longer, for over a century now. So it’s not as harsh as recently-occupied territories, it’s not in the active state. Russians killed most of Belarusians already, in 1937.
It’s weird we need to mask ourselves to survive. And that one can be persecuted basically on the basis of one’s origins and not only the language they speak, but the language they’d been spoken.