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Since the 20th century, however, people have started to identify themselves with their spoken vernacular and to conform to the literary norms set by academics. Although the ancestors of a small ethnic group of Russians - Goriuns resided in Putyvl region what is modern northern Ukraine in the times of Grand Duchy of Lithuania or perhaps even earlier, [3] [4] the Russian language in Ukraine has primarily come to exist in that country through two channels: The first new waves of Russian settlers onto what is now Ukrainian territory came in the late 16th century to the empty lands of Slobozhanshchyna that Russia gained from the Tatars , [4] although Ukrainian peasants from the west escaping harsh exploitative conditions outnumbered them.
More Russian speakers appeared in the northern, central and eastern territories of modern Ukraine during the late 17th century, following the Cossack Rebellion — which Bohdan Khmelnytsky led against Poland. The Khmelnytsky Uprising led to a massive movement of Ukrainian settlers to the Slobozhanshchyna region, which converted it from a sparsely inhabited frontier area to one of the major populated regions of the Tsardom of Russia.
Following the Pereyaslav Rada of the modern northern and eastern parts of Ukraine entered into the Russian Tsardom. This brought the first significant, but still small, wave of Russian settlers into central Ukraine primarily several thousand soldiers stationed in garrisons, [5] out of a population of approximately 1. Although the number of Russian settlers in Ukraine prior to the 18th century remained small, the local upper classes within the part of Ukraine acquired by Russia came to use the Russian language widely.
Beginning in the late 18th century, large numbers of Russians settled in newly acquired lands in what is now southern Ukraine, a region then known as Novorossiya "New Russia". These lands had been largely empty prior to the 18th century due to the threat of Crimean Tatar raids, but once St Petersburg had eliminated the Tatar state as a threat, Russian nobles were granted large tracts of fertile land that was worked by newly arrived peasants, most of whom were ethnic Ukrainians but many of whom were Russians.
The 19th century saw a dramatic increase in the urban Russian population in what is now Ukraine, as ethnic Russian settlers moved into and populated the newly industrialised and growing towns. At the beginning of the 20th century the Russians were the largest ethnic group in almost all large cities within Ukraine's modern borders, including the following: The Russian Empire promoted the spread of the Russian language among the native Ukrainian population by actively refusing to acknowledge the existence of the Ukrainian language.
Alarmed by the threat of Ukrainian separatism in its turn influenced by demands of Polish nationalists , the Russian Minister of Internal Affairs Pyotr Valuev in issued a secret decree that banned the publication of religious texts and educational texts written in the Ukrainian language [9] as non-grammatical, but allowed all other texts, including fiction. The Ukaz banned all Ukrainian language books and song lyrics, as well as the importation of such works.
Furthermore, Ukrainian-language public performances, plays, and lectures were forbidden. Ukrainian-only troupes were, however, forbidden. The Soviet Union in , decreed that all nationalities in the Soviet Union had the right to education in their own language. During the Soviet times, the attitude to Ukrainian language and culture went through periods of promotion policy of " korenization " , suppression during the period of Stalinism , and Ukrainization with the epoch of Khrushchev.
Ukrainian cultural organizations, such as theatres or the Writers' Union, were funded by the central administration.
While officially there was no state language in the Soviet Union until , Russian in practice had an implicitly privileged position as the only language widely spoken across the country. In Russian became legally the official all-Union language of the Soviet Union , with constituent republics having rights to declare their own official languages. Since the Euromaidan , Ukrainian government issued several laws aimed at enforced Ukrainization in media, education and other spheres.
The new law on education says that Ukrainian language is the language of education at all levels except for one or more subjects that are allowed to be taught in two or more languages, namely English or one of the other official languages of the European Union i. In July The Mykolaiv Okrug Administrative Court liquidated the status of the Russian language as a regional one, on the suit bringing to the norms of the national legislation due to the recognition of the law "On the principles of the state language policy" by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine as unconstitutional of the First Deputy Prosecutor of the Mykolaiv Oblast [17].
In October and December parliaments of the city of Kherson and Kharkiv Oblast also abolished the status of the Russian language as a regional one. There is a large difference between the numbers of people whose native language is Russian and people who adopted Russian as their everyday communication language. Another thing to keep in mind is that the percentage of Russian-speaking citizens is significantly higher in cities than in rural areas across the whole country.
According to official data from the Ukrainian census , the Russian language is native for Therefore, the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine forms the largest linguistic group in modern Europe with its language being non-official in the state. According to a public opinion poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology , the number of people using Russian language in their homes considerably exceeds the number of those who declared Russian as their native language in the census.
Russian language dominates in informal communication in the capital of Ukraine, Kiev. The Russian language in Ukraine is recognized as the language of a national minority but not as a state language. It is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution of Ukraine adopted by the parliament in Article 10 of the Constitution reads: The Ukrainian language was adopted as the state language by the Law on Languages adopted in Ukrainian SSR in ; Russian was specified as the language of communication with the other republics of Soviet Union.
The issue of Russian receiving the status of second official language has been the subject of extended controversial discussion ever since Ukraine became independent in In every Ukrainian election, many politicians, such as former president Leonid Kuchma , used their promise of making Russian a second state language to win support. The recent President of Ukraine , Viktor Yanukovych continued this practice when he was opposition leader. But in an interview with Kommersant during the Ukrainian presidential election -campaign he stated that the status of Russian in Ukraine "is too politicized" and said that if elected President in he would "have a real opportunity to adopt a law on languages, which implements the requirements of the European Charter of regional languages ".
Former president Viktor Yushchenko , during his Presidential campaign , also claimed a willingness to introduce more equality for Russian speakers. His clipping service spread an announcement of his promise to make Russian language proficiency obligatory for officials who interact with Russian-speaking citizens. In , the Kharkiv City Rada was the first to declare Russian to be a regional language. Several courts overturned the decision to change the status of the Russian language in the cities of Kryvyi Rih, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia and Mykolaiv while in Donetsk, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv oblasts it was retained.
In December the importation "anti-Ukrainian" books from Russia was restricted. According to a survey by the Research and Branding Group June , the majority of respondents supported the decisions of local authorities: A cross-national survey found that 0. Historically, many famous writers of Russian literature were born and lived in Ukraine.
Nikolai Gogol is probably the most famous example of shared Russo-Ukrainian heritage: Ukrainian by descent, he wrote in Russian, and significantly contributed to culture of both nations. Russian child poet Nika Turbina was born in Yalta , Crimea.
A significant number of contemporary authors from Ukraine write in Russian. Science fiction convention Zvezdny Most Rus. Outside science fiction and fantasy, there is also a number of Russophone realist writers and poets. Oldie, writing in Russian is an easier way for Ukrainian authors to be published and reach a broader audience. The authors say that it is because of Ukraine's ineffective book publishing policy: A study showed that: Russian-language programming is sometimes subtitled in Ukrainian, and commercials during Russian-language programs are in Ukrainian on Ukraine-based media.
Russian is by far the preferred language on websites in Ukraine While government organizations are required to have their websites in Ukrainian, Ukrainian usage of the Internet is mostly in the Russian language. According to DomainTyper, the top ranking. On May 15, , Ukrainian president Poroshenko issued a decree than demanded all Ukrainian internet providers to block access to all most popular Russian social media and websites, including VK, Odnoklassniki, Mail.
Among private secondary schools, each individual institution decides whether to study Russian or not. The number of Russian-teaching schools has reduced since Ukrainian independence in and now [ when? The Law on Education formerly granted Ukrainian families parents and their children a right to choose their native language for schools and studies. Higher education institutions in Ukraine generally use Ukrainian as the language of instruction. Stalinist policies shifted to define Russian as the language of inter-ethnic communication.
Although Ukrainian continued to be used in print, education, radio and later television programs , it lost its primary place in advanced learning and republic-wide media. Ukrainian was demoted to a language of secondary importance, often associated with the rise in Ukrainian self-awareness and nationalism and often branded "politically incorrect". The new Soviet Constitution adopted in , however, stipulated that teaching in schools should be conducted in native languages. Major repression started in —30, when a large group of Ukrainian intelligentsia was arrested and most were executed.
In Ukrainian history, this group is often referred to as " Executed Renaissance " Ukrainian: The vast majority of leading scholars and cultural leaders of Ukraine were liquidated, as were the "Ukrainianized" and "Ukrainianizing" portions of the Communist party.
Soviet Ukraine's autonomy was completely destroyed by the late s. Ideologists warned of over-glorifying Ukraine's Cossack past, and supported the closing of Ukrainian cultural institutions and literary publications. The systematic assault upon Ukrainian identity in culture and education, combined with effects of an artificial famine Holodomor upon the peasantry—the backbone of the nation—dealt Ukrainian language and identity a crippling blow.
This sequence of policy change was repeated in Western Ukraine when it was incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. In , and again in the late s, a policy of Ukrainianization was implemented. By the early s, Ukrainian was persecuted and a campaign of Russification began. After the death of Stalin , a general policy of relaxing the language policies of the past was implemented to The Nikita Khrushchev era which followed saw a policy of relatively lenient concessions to development of the languages at the local and republic level, though its results in Ukraine did not go nearly as far as those of the Soviet policy of Ukrainianization in the s.
Journals and encyclopedic publications advanced in the Ukrainian language during the Khrushchev era, as well as transfer of Crimea under Ukrainian SSR jurisdiction. Yet, the school reform that allowed parents to choose the language of primary instruction for their children, unpopular among the circles of the national intelligentsia in parts of the USSR, meant that non-Russian languages would slowly give way to Russian in light of the pressures of survival and advancement.
The gains of the past, already largely reversed by the Stalin era, were offset by the liberal attitude towards the requirement to study the local languages the requirement to study Russian remained. Parents were usually free to choose the language of study of their children except in few areas where attending the Ukrainian school might have required a long daily commute and they often chose Russian, which reinforced the resulting Russification. In this sense, some analysts argue that it was not the "oppression" or "persecution", but rather the lack of protection against the expansion of Russian language that contributed to the relative decline of Ukrainian in the s and s.
According to this view, it was inevitable that successful careers required a good command of Russian, while knowledge of Ukrainian was not vital, so it was common for Ukrainian parents to send their children to Russian-language schools, even though Ukrainian-language schools were usually available.
While in the Russian-language schools within the republic, Ukrainian was supposed to be learned as a second language at comparable level, the instruction of other subjects was in Russian and, as a result, students had a greater command of Russian than Ukrainian on graduation. Additionally, in some areas of the republic, the attitude towards teaching and learning of Ukrainian in schools was relaxed and it was, sometimes, considered a subject of secondary importance and even a waiver from studying it was sometimes given under various, ever expanding, circumstances. The complete suppression of all expressions of separatism or Ukrainian nationalism also contributed to lessening interest in Ukrainian.
Some people who persistently used Ukrainian on a daily basis were often perceived as though they were expressing sympathy towards, or even being members of, the political opposition. This, combined with advantages given by Russian fluency and usage, made Russian the primary language of choice for many Ukrainians, while Ukrainian was more of a hobby. In any event, the mild liberalization in Ukraine and elsewhere was stifled by new suppression of freedoms at the end of the Khrushchev era when a policy of gradually creeping suppression of Ukrainian was re-instituted.
The next part of the Soviet Ukrainian language policy divides into two eras: The second era, the policy of Shcherbytsky early s to early s , was one of gradual suppression of the Ukrainian language. The Communist Party leader from to , Petro Shelest , pursued a policy of defending Ukraine's interests within the Soviet Union.
He proudly promoted the beauty of the Ukrainian language and developed plans to expand the role of Ukrainian in higher education. He was removed, however, after only a brief tenure, for being too lenient on Ukrainian nationalism. The new party boss from to , Volodymyr Shcherbytsky , purged the local party, was fierce in suppressing dissent, and insisted Russian be spoken at all official functions, even at local levels.
His policy of Russification was lessened only slightly after The management of dissent by the local Ukrainian Communist Party was more fierce and thorough than in other parts of the Soviet Union. Although Ukrainian still remained the native language for the majority in the nation on the eve of Ukrainian independence, a significant share of ethnic Ukrainians were russified.
In Donetsk there were no Ukrainian language schools and in Kiev only a quarter of children went to Ukrainian language schools. The Russian language was the dominant vehicle, not just of government function, but of the media, commerce, and modernity itself. This was substantially less the case for western Ukraine, which escaped the artificial famine , Great Purge , and most of Stalinism. And this region became the center of a hearty, if only partial, renaissance of the Ukrainian language during independence.
Since , Ukrainian has been the official state language in Ukraine, and the state administration implemented government policies to broaden the use of Ukrainian. The educational system in Ukraine has been transformed over the first decade of independence from a system that is partly Ukrainian to one that is overwhelmingly so. The government has also mandated a progressively increased role for Ukrainian in the media and commerce. In some cases the abrupt changing of the language of instruction in institutions of secondary and higher education led to the charges of Ukrainianization , raised mostly by the Russian-speaking population.
This transition, however, lacked most of the controversies that arose during the de- russification of the other former Soviet Republics. With time, most residents, including ethnic Russians, people of mixed origin, and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, started to self-identify as Ukrainian nationals, even those who remained Russophone. The Russian language, however, still dominates the print media in most of Ukraine and private radio and TV broadcasting in the eastern, southern, and, to a lesser degree, central regions.
The state-controlled broadcast media have become exclusively Ukrainian. There are few obstacles to the usage of Russian in commerce and it is still occasionally used in government affairs. In the census , It should be noted, though, that for many Ukrainians of various ethnic descent , the term native language may not necessarily associate with the language they use more frequently. The overwhelming majority of ethnic Ukrainians consider the Ukrainian language native , including those who often speak Russian.
On the other hand, when the question "What language do you use in everyday life? Ethnic minorities, such as Romanians, Tatars and Jews usually use Russian as their lingua franca. But there are tendencies within these minority groups to use Ukrainian.
The Jewish writer Olexander Beyderman from the mainly Russian-speaking city of Odessa is now writing most of his dramas in Ukrainian. The emotional relationship regarding Ukrainian is changing in southern and eastern areas. The literary Ukrainian language, which was preceded by Old East Slavic literature, may be subdivided into three stages: Much literature was written in the periods of the old and middle Ukrainian language, including legal acts, polemical articles, science treatises and fiction of all sorts. The earliest literary work in the modern Ukrainian language was recorded in when Ivan Kotlyarevsky , a playwright from Poltava in southeastern Ukraine, published his epic poem , Eneyida , a burlesque in Ukrainian, based on Virgil 's Aeneid.
His book was published in vernacular Ukrainian in a satirical way to avoid being censored, and is the earliest known Ukrainian published book to survive through Imperial and, later, Soviet policies on the Ukrainian language. Kotlyarevsky's work and that of another early writer using the Ukrainian vernacular language, Petro Artemovsky, used the southeastern dialect spoken in the Poltava, Kharkiv and southern Kieven regions of the Russian Empire.
This dialect would serve as the basis of the Ukrainian literary language when it was developed by Taras Shevchenko and Panteleimon Kulish in the mid 19th century. In order to raise its status from that of a dialect to that of a language, various elements from folklore and traditional styles were added to it. The Ukrainian literary language developed further when the Russian state banned the use of the Ukrainian language, prompting many of its writers to move to the western Ukrainian region of Galicia which was under more liberal Austrian rule; after the s the majority of Ukrainian literary works were published in Austrian Galicia.
During this period Galician influences were adopted in the Ukrainian literary language, particularly with respect to vocabulary involving law, government, technology, science, and administration. The use of the Ukrainian language is increasing after a long period of decline. Although there are almost fifty million ethnic Ukrainians worldwide, including In Kiev, both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken, a notable shift from the recent past when the city was primarily Russian-speaking.
The shift is believed to be caused, largely, by an influx of the rural population and migrants from the western regions of Ukraine but also by some Kievans' turning to use the language they speak at home more widely in everyday matters. Public signs and announcements in Kiev are in Ukrainian. In southern and eastern Ukraine, Russian is the prevalent language of the urban population.
According to the Ukrainian Census of , Use of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine can be expected to increase, as the rural population migrates into the cities. In eastern and southern Ukraine, the rural Ukrainophones continue to prefer Russian.
Interest in Ukrainian literature is growing rapidly, compensating for the periods when its development was hindered by either policies of direct suppression or lack of state support. Ukrainian has become popular in other countries through movies and songs performed in the Ukrainian language. In countries with significant Ukrainian populations, bands singing in the Ukrainian language sometimes reach top places in the charts, such as Enej from Poland.
The s saw a revival of Ukrainian cinema. Oleksa Horbach's study of argots analyzed sources argots of professionals, thugs, prisoners, homeless, school children, etc. Several modern dialects of Ukrainian exist [46] [47]. All the countries neighbouring Ukraine except for Hungary historically have regions with a sizable Ukrainian population and therefore Ukrainian language speakers.
Ukrainian is an official minority language in some of them. The founders of this population primarily emigrated from Galicia , which used to be part of Austro-Hungary before World War I, and belonged to Poland between the World Wars. The language spoken by most of them is the Galician dialect of Ukrainian from the first half of the 20th century. Compared with modern Ukrainian, the vocabulary of Ukrainians outside Ukraine reflects less influence of Russian, but often contains many loanwords from the local language.
Canada and the United States are also home to a large Ukrainian population. Broken up by country to the nearest thousand: Ukrainian is one of three official languages of the breakaway Moldovan republic of Transnistria. Ukrainian is widely spoken within the ,strong in Ukrainian community in Brazil. Ukrainian is a fusional , nominative-accusative , satellite framed language.
It exhibits T-V distinction , and is null-subject. The canonical word order of Ukrainian is SVO. Nouns decline for 7 cases: Adjectives agree with nouns in case , gender , and number. Verbs conjugate for 3 tenses: Ukrainian verbs come in aspect pairs: Pairs are usually formed by a prepositional prefix and occasionally a root change. The past tense agrees with its subject in number and gender , having developed from the perfect participle. Ukrainian case endings are somewhat different from Old East Slavic, and the vocabulary includes a large overlay of Polish terminology.
A number of the consonants come in three forms: Unlike Russian and most other modern Slavic languages, Ukrainian does not have final devoicing. Ukrainian is written in a version of Cyrillic , consisting of 33 letters, representing 38 phonemes ; an apostrophe is also used. Ukrainian orthography is based on the phonemic principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme, although there are a number of exceptions. The orthography also has cases where the semantic, historical, and morphological principles are applied. The modern Ukrainian alphabet is the result of a number of proposed alphabetic reforms from the 19th and early 20th centuries, in Ukraine under the Russian Empire, in Austrian Galicia, and later in Soviet Ukraine.
A unified Ukrainian alphabet the Skrypnykivka , after Mykola Skrypnyk was officially established at a international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv , during the period of Ukrainization in Soviet Ukraine. But the policy was reversed in the s, and the Soviet Ukrainian orthography diverged from that used by the diaspora.
These iotated vowel letters and a special soft sign change a preceding consonant from hard to soft. An apostrophe is used to indicate the hardness of the sound in the cases when normally the vowel would change the consonant to soft; in other words, it functions like the yer in the Russian alphabet. The Dictionary of Ukrainian Language in 11 volumes contains , entries. Ukrainian has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with other Slavic languages and is considered to be most closely related to Belarusian. In the 19th century, the question of whether Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian languages are dialects of a single language or three separate languages was actively discussed, with the debate affected by linguistic and political factors.
The underlying theory of the grouping is their descent from a common ancestor. In modern times, Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian are usually listed by linguists as separate languages. Until the 17th and 18th centuries the time of national and language revival of Ukraine the Ukrainians were predominantly peasants and petits bourgeois ; as a result, the Ukrainian language was mostly vernacular and few earlier literary works from the period can be found.
In the cities, Ukrainian coexisted with Church Slavonic — a literary language of religion that evolved from the Old Slavonic — and later Polish and Russian , both languages which were more often used in formal writing and communication during that time. The Ukrainian language has the following similarities and differences with other Slavic languages:. Unlike all other Slavic languages, Ukrainian has a synthetic future also termed inflectional future tense which developed through the erosion and cliticization of the verb 'to have' or possibly 'to take': Danylenko argues that Ukrainian differs from Romance in the choice of auxiliary, which should be interpreted as 'to take' and not 'to have.
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Ukrainian music and Ukrainian cinema. This section needs to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. Drahomanivka and Ukrainian Latin alphabet. Ukraine portal Language portal Linguistics portal. Retrieved 3 December Archived from the original on 27 February Retrieved 16 June Classification and Index of the World's Languages Elsevier. The Languages of the Soviet Union Cambridge. 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 Retrieved 8 May University of Toronto Press.
Emerging meso-areas in the former socialist countries: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University. Shevchenko Scientific Society, pg. Archived from the original on