Jump to navigation Jump to search “ukr” ukrainian russian relations here. This article needs additional citations for verification. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Historical linguists trace the origin of the Ukrainian language to the Old East Slavic of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus’.
Institute for the Ukrainian Language, Ukrainian language-information fund, and Potebnya Institute of Language Studies. The first theory of the origin of Ukrainian language was suggested in Imperial Russia in the middle of the 18th century by Mikhail Lomonosov. This theory posits the existence of a common language spoken by all East Slavic people in the time of the Rus’. Another point of view developed during the 19th and 20th centuries by linguists of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.
Like Lomonosov, they assumed the existence of a common language spoken by East Slavs in the past. Some scholars see a divergence between the language of Galicia-Volhynia and the language of Novgorod-Suzdal by the 12th century, assuming that before the 12th century, the two languages were practically indistinguishable. Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky went even further, denying the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. During the 13th century, when German settlers were invited to Ukraine by the princes of Galicia-Vollhynia, 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. 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.
West Slavic languages than with Russian or Church Slavonic. The era of Rus’ is the subject of some linguistic controversy, as the language of much of the literature was purely or heavily Old Slavonic. Volhynia, 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. The southwestern Ukrainian dialects are transitional to Polish. After the Treaty of Pereyaslav, Ukrainian high culture went into a long period of steady decline.
In the aftermath, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was taken over by the Russian Empire and closed down later in the 19th century. During the 19th century, a revival of Ukrainian self-identification manifested in the literary classes of both Russian-Empire Dnieper Ukraine and Austrian Galicia. 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. 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 and Bukovyna, where Ukrainian was widely used in education and official documents. In the Russian Empire Census of 1897 the following picture emerged, with Ukrainian being the second most spoken language of the Russian Empire.
The Ukrainian text in this Soviet poster reads: “The Social base of the USSR is an unbreakable union of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia”. During the seven-decade-long Soviet era, the Ukrainian language held the formal position of the principal local language in the Ukrainian SSR. Officially, there was no state language in the Soviet Union until the very end when it was proclaimed in 1990 that Russian language was the all-Union state language and that the constituent republics had rights to declare additional state languages within their jurisdictions. Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Empire was broken up. In different parts of the former empire, several nations, including Ukrainians, developed a renewed sense of national identity. In the chaotic post-revolutionary years the Ukrainian language gained some usage in government affairs.
It uses traditional Ukrainian imagery with Ukrainian-language text: “Son! Enroll in the school of Red commanders, and the defense of Soviet Ukraine will be ensured. The widening use of Ukrainian further developed in the first years of Bolshevik rule into a policy called korenizatsiya. The government pursued a policy of Ukrainianization by lifting a ban on the Ukrainian language. The policy even reached those regions of southern Russian SFSR where the ethnic Ukrainian population was significant, particularly the areas by the Don River and especially Kuban in the North Caucasus.
