Percentage of Ukrainians who prefer to read in Ukrainian has doubled in five years

The percentage of Ukrainians who prefer to read books in Ukrainian has more than doubled in the past five years, with a new survey indicating it currently stands at 54%.

The survey, conducted by Info Sapiens International as part of the “Support of Promotion of Reading in Ukraine” project, recorded a jump of 26 percentage points from 2018, when only 28% of respondents indicated they preferred Ukrainian. A clear majority — 76% — of people who speak Ukrainian at home also said they found the language easy to read.

Just over a third of respondents, 36%, indicated they don’t care what language they read in, whether Russian or Ukrainian. This is down from 45% in the 2018 survey. This option was the most popular, at 59%, for respondents who indicated they use both languages in their daily lives.

The survey suggests that the popularity of the Ukrainian language is growing in general, and the “prestige” of Russian is declining. The percentage of people who preferred to read books in Russian was 28% in 2018 but dropped to 10% in 2023.

The largest share of readers of Russian-language texts remains among families where Russian is the main language of communication, at 43%. Even in these families, a relative majority, 49%, choose the option “it doesn’t matter what language you read in.”

A total of 1,016 adult respondents participated in the survey, with the largest number of respondents in Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv oblasts, and Kyiv. Overall, the survey covered residents of all regions of Ukraine, except the occupied Crimea peninsula.

As previously reported, more than 30% of Kyiv residents switched to Ukrainian after Feb. 24, 2022, according to the Kyiv Digital app. And almost 60% of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian exclusively at home, according to a study by the Sociological Group Rating.

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