Ukrainian dialect

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

This map is more important than any polls and research.

It is clearly seen that if you mentally separate the former Polish territories, annexed in 1939, you get a state. Before us is the natural part of Russia (which was previously separated from the main territory only by a conditional administrative boundary).

Is it really strange that the Russians are worried about her?

Speaking strictly within the framework of linguistics, the Ukrainian language itself is a dialect of the Russian language. But for political reasons, since the post-war period, it (like Belarusian) has been singled out as an independent language. But on academic dialectological maps it is still called that - the Ukrainian dialect. The very group of Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) is conditional. Speaking about it, a special reservation is always made in academic publications, referring to historical circumstances and tradition, but not to the linguistic reasons for the separation of languages.

And these languages arose precisely as independent languages for the reason that in the UN, the USSR was represented, in addition to the USSR itself, by Ukraine and Belarus. And to formalize their status, attributes were needed, one of which is language. As a result, the dialects that formed after the XIV-XV centuries (under the influence of Poland and Lithuania, which included, respectively, the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands), as it were, by default became independent languages within the conditional (from a linguistic point of view) East Slavic group.

The illusion of the existence of the Ukrainian language proper arose already in Soviet times, when the so-called literary Ukrainian language was described and formalized on the basis of the Poltava dialect, which was used in the official sphere - newspapers, books, radio, etc. Before that, it was perceived on an equal basis with other dialects. The same Gogol did not enter into his head to write in Ukrainian (now he is being translated into Ukrainian and so studied in schools!). He knew this dialect, he used it in the direct speech of his heroes, but he did it exactly as writers do today with South Russian or northern dialects.

For comparison: the dialectical differences within the German language are many times greater than between Russian and Ukrainian, although it exists on a much (several times) smaller territory. Why, for example, do the Austrians not consider their language Austrian, but consider it a branch of German? The same picture in Armenian and many others.

Half of the words in Korean are borrowed from Chinese. But only on this basis, no one considers this language one of the great many Chinese dialects (within the borders of China itself there are about 55 dialects that are so different from each other that speakers of different dialects usually do not understand each other, therefore only a unified hieroglyphic writing is a means of communication). After all, the fact is that the Korean language differs from the Chinese language in syntax. And among the Slavic languages, both Ukrainian and Belarusian "language" use the same syntax as Russian. On this basis, linguists distinguish them as dialects.