Ukrainian-language

Ukrainian (, ) is an East Slavic language, spoken primarily in Ukraine. It is the first (native) language of a large majority of Ukrainians.

Written Ukrainian uses the Ukrainian alphabet, a variant of the Cyrillic script. The standard language is studied by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Potebnia Institute of Linguistics. Comparisons are often made between Ukrainian and Russian, another East Slavic language, yet there is more mutual intelligibility with Belarusian,Alexander M. Schenker. 1993. "Proto-Slavonic", ''The Slavonic Languages''. (Routledge). pp. 60–121. p. 60: " hedistinction between dialect and language being blurred, there can be no unanimity on this issue in all instances..."
C.F. Voegelin and F.M. Voegelin. 1977. ''Classification and Index of the World's Languages'' (Elsevier). p. 311, "In terms of immediate mutual intelligibility, the East Slavic zone is a single language."
Bernard Comrie. 1981. ''The Languages of the Soviet Union'' (Cambridge). pp. 145–146: "The three East Slavonic languages are very close to one another, with very high rates of mutual intelligibility...The separation of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian as distinct languages is relatively recent...Many Ukrainians in fact speak a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, finding it difficult to keep the two languages apart..."
The Swedish linguist Alfred Jensen wrote in 1916 that the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian languages was significant and that it could be compared to the difference between Swedish and Danish. Jensen, Alfred. ''Slaverna och världskriget. Reseminnen och intryck från Karpaterna till Balkan 1915–16.''. Albert Bonniers förlag, Stockholm, 1916, p. 145. and a closer lexical distance to West Slavic Polish and South Slavic Bulgarian.

Ukrainian is a descendant of Old East Slavic, a language spoken in the medieval state of Kievan Rus'. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the language developed into Ruthenian, where it became an official language, before a process of Polonization began in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. By the 18th century, Ruthenian diverged into regional variants, and the modern Ukrainian language developed in the territory of present-day Ukraine. Russification saw the Ukrainian language banned as a subject from schools and as a language of instruction in the Russian Empire, and continued in various ways in the Soviet Union.Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy
by Jonathan Steele, Harvard University Press, 1988, (p. 217) Even so, the language continued to see use throughout the country, and remained particularly strong in Western Ukraine.Purism and Language: A Study in Modem Ukrainian and Belorussian Nationalism
by Paul Wexler, Indiana University Press, (page 309) Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine by Laada Bilaniuk, Cornell Univ. Press, 2006, (page 78)

Linguistic development

Theories

Specific developments that led to a gradual change of the Old East Slavic vowel system into the system found in modern Ukrainian began around the 12th/13th century (that is, still at the time of the Kievan Rus') with a lengthening and raising of the Old East Slavic mid vowels ''e'' and ''o'' when followed by a consonant and a weak yer vowel that would eventually disappear completely, for example Old East Slavic котъ /kɔtə/ > Ukrainian кіт /kit/ 'cat' (via transitional stages such as /koˑtə̆/, /kuˑt(ə̆)/, /kyˑt/ or similar) or Old East Slavic печь /pʲɛtʃʲə/ > Ukrainian піч /pitʃ/ 'oven' (via transitional stages such as /pʲeˑtʃʲə̆/, /pʲiˑtʃʲ/ or similar). This raising and other phonological developments of the time, such as the merger of the Old East Slavic vowel phonemes и /i/ and ы /ɨ/ into the specifically Ukrainian phoneme /ɪ ~ e/, spelled with и (in the 13th/14th centuries), and the fricativisation of the Old East Slavic consonant г /g/, probably first to /ɣ/ (in the 13th century), with /ɦ/ as a reflex in Modern Ukrainian, did not happen in Russian. Only the fricativisation of Old East Slavic г /g/ occurred in Belarusian, where the present-day reflex is /ɣ/.

Ahatanhel Krymsky and Aleksey Shakhmatov assumed the existence of the common spoken language of Eastern Slavs only in prehistoric times. According to them the diversification of the Old East Slavic language took place in the 8th or early 9th century.

Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak stated that the Old Novgorod dialect differed significantly from that of other dialects of Kievan Rus' during the 11th–12th century, but started becoming more similar to them around the 13th–15th centuries. The modern Russian language hence developed from the fusion of this Novgorod dialect and the common dialect spoken by the other Kievan Rus', whereas the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages developed from dialects which did not differ from each other in a significant way.

Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky denies the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko and others. According to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects, mostly due to an intensive migration of the population within the territory of today's Ukraine in later historical periods. This point of view was also supported by George Shevelov's phonological studies, which argue that specific features were already recognizable in the southern dialects of Old East Slavic (seen as ancestors to Ukrainian) as far back as these varieties can be documented.

Origins and developments during medieval times

As a result of close Slavic contacts with the remnants of the Scythian and Sarmatian population north of the Black Sea, lasting into the early Middle Ages, the appearance of the voiced fricative γ/г (romanized "h"), in modern Ukrainian and some southern Russian dialects is explained by the assumption that it initially emerged in Scythian and related eastern Iranian dialects, from earlier common Proto-Indo-European ''*g'' and ''*gʰ''.

During the 13th century, when German settlers were invited to Ukraine by the princes of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, German words began to appear in the language spoken in Ukraine. Their influence would continue under Poland not only through German colonists but also through the Yiddish-speaking Jews. Often such words involve trade or handicrafts. Examples of words of German or Yiddish origin spoken in Ukraine include ("roof"), ("pipe"), ("market"), ("furrier"), and ("master" or "craftsman").History of the Ukrainian Language. R. Smal-Stocky. In ''Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia.''(1963). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 490–500

Developments under Poland and Lithuania

In the 13th century, eastern parts of Rus (including Moscow) came under Tatar rule until their unification under the Tsardom of Muscovy, whereas the south-western areas (including Kyiv) were incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For the following four centuries, the languages of the two regions evolved in relative isolation from each other. Direct written evidence of the existence of the Ukrainian language dates to the late 16th century. By the 16th century, a peculiar official language formed: a mixture of the liturgical standardised language of Old Church Slavonic, Ruthenian and Polish. The influence of the latter gradually increased relative to the former two, as the nobility and rural large-landowning class, known as the szlachta, was largely Polish-speaking. Documents soon took on many Polish characteristics superimposed on Ruthenian phonetics. Mykola Kostomarov, ''Russian History in Biographies of its main figures'', Chapter
Knyaz Kostantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky
'' ( Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski)

Polish–Lithuanian rule and education also involved significant exposure to Latin. Much of the influence of Poland on the development of the Ukrainian language has been attributed to this period, and is reflected in multiple words and constructions used in everyday Ukrainian speech that were taken from Polish or Latin. Examples of Polish words adopted from this period include ''zavzhdy'' (always; taken from old Polish word ''zawżdy'') and ''obitsiaty'' (to promise; taken from Polish ''obiecać'') and from Latin (via Polish) ''raptom'' (suddenly) and ''meta'' (aim or goal).

Significant contact with Tatars and Turks resulted in many Turkic words, particularly those involving military matters and steppe industry, being adopted into the Ukrainian language. Examples include ''torba'' (bag) and ''tyutyun'' (tobacco).

Because of the substantial number of loanwords from Polish, German, Czech and Latin, early modern vernacular Ukrainian (''prosta mova'', " simple speech") had more lexical similarity with West Slavic languages than with Russian or Church Slavonic. By the mid-17th century, the linguistic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages had become so significant that there was a need for translators during negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav, between Bohdan Khmelnytsky, head of the Zaporozhian Host, and the Russian state.

By the 18th century, Ruthenian had diverged into regional variants, developing into the modern Belarusian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian languages.

Chronology

The accepted chronology of Ukrainian divides the language into Old Ukrainian, Middle Ukrainian, and Modern Ukrainian. Shevelov explains that much of this is based on the character of contemporary written sources, ultimately reflecting socio-historical developments, and he further subdivides the Middle period into three phases:

* Proto-Ukrainian (abbreviated PU, Ukrainian: , until the mid-11th century), with no extant written sources by speakers in Ukraine. Corresponding to aspects of Old East Slavic.
* Old Ukrainian (OU, or , mid-11th to 14th c., conventional end date 1387), elements of phonology are deduced from written texts mainly in Church Slavic. Part of broader Old East Slavic.
* Middle Ukrainian ( or , 15th to 18th c.), historically called Ruthenian.
** Early Middle Ukrainian (EMU, , 15th to mid-16th c., 1387–1575), analysis focuses on distinguishing Ukrainian and Belarusian texts.
** Middle Ukrainian (MU, , mid-16th to early 18th c., 1575–1720), represented by several vernacular language varieties as well as a version of Church Slavonic.
** Late Middle Ukrainian (LMU, , rest of the 18th c., 1720–1818), found in many mixed Ukrainian–Russian and Russian–Ukrainian texts.
* Modern Ukrainian (MoU, from the very end of the 18th c., or , from 1818), the vernacular recognized first in literature, and subsequently all other written genres.

Ukraine marks the Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language on 9 November, the Eastern Orthodox feast day of Nestor the Chronicler.

History of the spoken language

Rus' and Kingdom of Ruthenia

The era of Kievan Rus' ( 880–1240) is the subject of some linguistic controversy, as the language of much of the literature was purely or heavily Old Church Slavonic. Some theorists see an early Ukrainian stage in language development here, calling it Old Ruthenian; others term this era Old East Slavic. Russian theorists tend to amalgamate Rus' to the modern nation of Russia, and call this linguistic era Old Russian. However, according to Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak (2012), people from the Novgorod Republic did not call themselves ''Rus'' until the 14th century; earlier Novgorodians reserved the term ''Rus'' for the Kiev, Pereyaslavl and Chernigov principalities. At the same time as evidenced by contemporary chronicles, the ruling princes and kings of Galicia–Volhynia and Kiev called themselves "people of Rus" (in foreign sources called "Ruthenians"), and Galicia–Volhynia has alternately been called the Principality or Kingdom of Ruthenia.

Also according to Andrey Zaliznyak, the Novgorodian dialect differed significantly from that of other dialects of Kievan Rus during the 11th–12th century, but
started becoming more similar to them around 13th–15th centuries. The modern Russian language hence developed from the fusion of this Novgorodian dialect and the common dialect spoken by the other Kievan Rus, whereas the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages developed from the dialects which did not differ from each other in a significant way.

Under Lithuania/Poland and Muscovy/Russia

After the fall of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, Ukrainians mainly fell under the rule of Lithuania and then Poland. Local autonomy of both rule and language was a marked feature of Lithuanian rule. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Old East Slavic became the language of the chancellery and gradually evolved into the Ruthenian language. Polish rule, which came later, was accompanied by a more assimilationist policy. By the 1569 Union of Lublin that formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a significant part of Ukrainian territory was moved from Lithuanian rule to Polish administration, resulting in cultural Polonization and visible attempts to colonize Ukraine by the Polish nobility.

Many Ukrainian nobles learned the Polish language and converted to Catholicism during that period in order to maintain their lofty aristocratic position. Lower classes were less affected because literacy was common only in the upper class and clergy. The latter were also under significant Polish pressure after the Union with the Catholic Church. Most of the educational system was gradually Polonized. In Ruthenia, the language of administrative documents gradually shifted towards Polish.

Polish has had heavy influences on Ukrainian (particularly in Western Ukraine). The southwestern Ukrainian dialects are transitional to Polish.Geoffrey Hull, Halyna Koscharsky.
Contours and Consequences of the Lexical Divide in Ukrainian
". ''Australian Slavonic and East European Studies''. Vol. 20, no. 1-2. 2006. pp. 140–147. As the Ukrainian language developed further, some borrowings from Tatar and Turkish occurred. Ukrainian culture and language flourished in the sixteenth and first half of the 17th century, when Ukraine was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, albeit in spite of being part of the PLC, not as a result. Among many schools established in that time, the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (the predecessor of the modern Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), founded by the Orthodox Metropolitan Peter Mogila, was the most important. At that time languages were associated more with religions: Catholics spoke Polish, and members of the Orthodox church spoke Ruthenian.

The 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement between Cossack Hetmanate and Alexis of Russia divided Ukraine between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Tsardom of Russia. During the following century, both monarchies became increasingly intolerant of Ukrainian own cultural and political aspirations. Ukrainians found themselves in a colonial situation. The Russian centre adopted the name ''Little Russia'' for Ukraine and ''Little Russian'' for the language, an expression that originated in Byzantine Greek and may originally have meant "old, original, fundamental Russia", and had been in use since the 14th century. Ukrainian high culture went into a long period of steady decline. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was taken over by the Russian Empire. Most of the remaining Ukrainian schools also switched to Polish or Russian in the territories controlled by these respective countries, which was followed by a new wave of Polonization and Russification of the native nobility. Gradually the official language of Ukrainian provinces under Poland was changed to Polish, while the upper classes in the Russian part of Ukraine used Russian.

In Austrian Galicia and Lodomeria (1772–1918)

After the 1772 First Partition of Poland, when the lands annexed by the Austrian Habsburg monarchy were reorganised as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, the Habsburg administration was initially surprised to find out that, apart from Poles, there were a lot of other people living in it whom they began calling ''Ruthenen'' ("Ruthenians" or "Rusyny"). They differed from the Poles in that the vast majority of them adhered to the Greek Catholic faith (organised as the Ruthenian Uniate Church) rather than Roman Catholic, and that their liturgical language was Church Slavonic rather than Latin. Most of them had not received much education; they used Ruthenian only as a spoken language, few could read or write, and those who did more often used Polish or (increasingly) German instead. As Empress Maria Theresa had introduced a general compulsory education (''Allgemeiner Schulzwang'') in 1774, and enacted it in newly-acquired Galicia and Lodomeria in 1777, the decision was made to produce Polish and Ruthenian textbooks that were used in elementary schools for those language communities.

Although some Ruthenian parish schools were established in some villages, and some printed primers and catechisms in Ruthenian were distributed there, the effects of Ruthenian-language education achieved very little until 1815. That year, , a Przemyśl eparchy canon who contributed to the establishment of a strong network of Ruthenian parish schools and a teacher training school, published a catechism at the Royal University of Buda entitled ''Christian Learning in the Case of the Common Catechism for Parish Children''. He followed this up in 1823 by a ''Grammar of the Slovene–Ruthenian language'' (never published), and in 1829 by his treatise ''Information on the Ruthenian Language'' (published both in Polish as ''Rozprawa o ięzyku ruskim'' and in Ruthenian as "Відомість о руском языці"), which represents the first scholarly study arguing that Ruthenian was a language in its own right, separate from Polish, Russian, and Church Slavonic. On the other hand, new educational regulations in 1818 determined that schools that were exclusively attended by children of Greek Catholic parents were to receive instruction in Ruthenian, whereas schools attended by children of both Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic parents had Polish as the medium of instruction. Nevertheless, pupils at Ruthenian-instruction schools had to learn Polish as a second language as well. In higher education, Ruthenian was not valued as an equal language, and students were expected to learn and use Latin and Polish instead. Students training to become Greek Catholic priests at the University of Lviv did receive instruction in Ruthenian in the so-called "Studium ruthenum" according to Austrian regulations between 1787 and 1809, but it was not a fully-fledged course; instead, it was regarded as a temporary measure for students who did not yet know Latin. Both its professors and alumni received only half the salary of their counterparts from the "Studium latinum", the number of students steadily decreased over the decades, and in 1809 the Ruthenians themselves requested the "Studium ruthenum" to be abandoned.

In the first few decades of the Austrian period in Galicia, there was also confusion amongst both the Habsburg administration and educated Ruthenians about which variety of written Ruthenian to use: late Church Slavonic, literary Russian, traditional written Ruthenian, or something close to how Ruthenian was actually spoken in Galicia at that time. The Habsburg Imperial censor for Slavic publications, Jernej Kopitar (himself from Slovenia), encouraged Ruthenian authors to base their written language on the Ruthenian vernacular, and from December 1833 onwards, to write Ruthenian in a Latin alphabet rather than Cyrillic. This initiated a discussion on Ruthenian identity, later called the "First Alphabet War" or "Blizzard". Although most Ruthenian intellectuals did respond by increasingly basing their writings on spoken Ruthenian, the majority of them defended the use Cyrillic over concerns of Polonisation. Nevertheless, they could not agree on various standardisation issues; three different Ruthenian grammars were published between 1834 and 1848, and none of them was widely adopted. Before 1848, no Ruthenian dictionaries were produced, no Ruthenian-language periodical press existed within Habsburg Galicia, and Ruthenian played no role as language of administration.

The Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire changed everything: the native languages of most populations in the Empire, including Ruthenian, were accorded official status, and all laws in the Danubian monarchy would be published in these languages from 1 October 1849 onwards. Ruthenian would henceforth to be used in local administration in the ''Landesgesetzblätter''. From 1849 onwards, various official periodicals were established in Ruthenian, and the Interior Ministry stipulated in July 1849 that street signs in Lviv had to include Ruthenian versions. In October 1852, the Ministry of Justice also decreed that Ruthenian could be used by parties involved in legal issues in their communication with the courts of law, although it would take until 1861 to allow these letters to employ ''skoropys'' Cyrillic rather than Latin script (or the Muscovite ''graždanka'' variety of Cyrillic). In the post-1848, there were some contradictory developments, some of which countered Polonisation in the sphere of education, while others stimulated further Polonisation in the sphere of administration. Similarly, Galician Russophilia or Moscophilia strived towards ever greater assimilation of Ruthenian towards the so-called "Great Russian" language as used in Moscow that still heavily leaned on Church Slavonic, while both the Habsburg administration and Greek Catholic Church raised concerns that these were "barely comprehensible" to the common people of Galicia and hampered the "development of the Ruthenian language", adding that Orthodox Imperial Russia was a threat to the overwhelmingly Catholic Habsburg realm.

Matters once again came to a head in May 1859, when the Polish governor of Galicia Gołuchowski recommended Czech linguist Josef Jireček's proposal for a Ruthenian Latin alphabet, leading to the "Second Alphabet War" or "Blizzard". Ruthenian intellectuals almost unanimously rejected the proposal for fear of Polonisation, leading the government to overreact by banning the "Russian script" (meaning the Muscovite ''graždanka'') in July 1859, which Ruthenian writers generally ignored. By March 1861, the Habsburg State Ministry essentially conceded defeat by stating that the Ruthenians themselves were responsible for developing their own language, and that it was not up to the government. Around the same time, however, Ruthenian intellectuals became acquainted with the writings of Ukrainian intellectuals from "Little Russia" in the Russian Empire, such as poet Taras Shevchenko (died 1861), who was fiercely anti-Russian and Ukrainophile, leading many earlier Galician Ruthenians to abandon their Russophilia. In between the pro-Polish and pro-Russian tendencies, the Ruthenian language in Galicia would gradually develop into an independent literary and intellectual written language in the second half of the 19th century, when it was increasingly called "Ukrainian".

In the Russian Empire

During the 19th century, a revival of Ukrainian self-identification manifested in the literary classes of both Russian-Empire Dnieper Ukraine and Austrian Galicia. The Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Kyiv applied an old word for the Cossack motherland, ''Ukrajina'', as a self-appellation for the nation of Ukrainians, and ''Ukrajins'ka mova'' for the language. Many writers published works in the Romantic tradition of Europe demonstrating that Ukrainian was not merely a language of the village but suitable for literary pursuits.

However, in the Russian Empire expressions of Ukrainian culture and especially language were repeatedly persecuted for fear that a self-aware Ukrainian nation would threaten the unity of the empire. In 1804 Ukrainian as a subject and language of instruction was banned from schools. In 1811, by order of the Russian government, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was closed.

In 1847 the Brotherhood of St Cyril and Methodius was terminated. The same year Taras Shevchenko was arrested, exiled for ten years, and banned for political reasons from writing and painting. In 1862 Pavlo Chubynsky was exiled for seven years to Arkhangelsk. The Ukrainian magazine '' Osnova'' was discontinued. In 1863, the tsarist interior minister Pyotr Valuyev proclaimed in his decree that "there never has been, is not, and never can be a separate Little Russian language". Валуевский циркуляр, full text of the Valuyev circular on Wikisource

Although the name of Ukraine is known since 1187, it was not applied to the language until the mid-19th century.https://www.husj.harvard.edu/articles/the-battle-for-ukrainian-an-introduction "It was during this period that elites on both sides of the border began to apply the term Ukrainian to the varieties formerly called Ruthenian and Little Russian." The linguonym ''Ukrainian language'' appears in Yakub Holovatsky's book from 1849, listed there as a variant name of the ''Little Russian language''. In a private letter from 1854, Taras Shevchenko lauds "our splendid Ukrainian language". Valuyev's decree from 1863 derides the "Little Russian" language throughout, but also mentions "the so-called Ukrainian language" once. In Galicia, the earliest applications of the term ''Ukrainian'' to the language were in the hyphenated names ''Ukrainian-Ruthenian'' (1866, by Paulin Święcicki) or ''Ruthenian-Ukrainian'' (1871, by Panteleimon Kulish and Ivan Puluj), with non-hyphenated ''Ukrainian language'' appearing shortly thereafter (in 1878, by Mykhailo Drahomanov).

A following ban on Ukrainian books led to Alexander II's secret Ems Ukaz, which prohibited publication and importation of most Ukrainian-language books, public performances and lectures, and even banned the printing of Ukrainian texts accompanying musical scores. A period of leniency after 1905 was followed by another strict ban in 1914, which also affected Russian-occupied Galicia.

For much of the 19th century the Austrian authorities demonstrated some preference for Polish culture, but the Ukrainians were relatively free to partake in their own cultural pursuits in Halychyna

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases