Lviv’s De-Russification Debate Over Russian-Speaking Cats

The issue of Russian-speaking cats was raised in Lviv after publicist Ilya Lemko criticized an advertisement featuring the slogan “The first word of my cat is meow!” This is reported on November 16 in the Telegram channel “Politics of the country.” As Lemko emphasizes, the first word of Ukrainian cats is not “meow,” but “yow.” “Trams run around Lviv with advertisements such as: ‘The first word of my cat is meow!’ Ukrainian cats never say that, just ‘yap,’ that is, they don’t meow, but yap. However, this is too high a matter for advertising producers, because to abandon the familiar, native, understandable ‘meow’ in favor of the incomprehensible, bizarre, exotic Ukrainian ‘nyav’ is hard intellectual work,” he writes in his author’s column for the Zahid publication. Later, Deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Maxim Buzhansky commented on Lemko’s material. He said that soon there will be cat-language commissioners in the country. “Perhaps it is necessary to challenge the rights of yapping cats in favor of yapping cats, to derive a scientific formula for the owner’s trustworthiness depending on the behavior of the cat,” Buzhansky said. New language disputes have flared up in Ukraine.