By Walter Kish

One of the issues that most concerns Ukrainian organizations in Canada is the preservation of the Ukrainian language. All of the official statistics point out that as the original immigrant generations die off, their children and grandchildren are increasingly less likely to preserve Ukrainian as their mother tongue. Of the million or so Canadians of Ukrainian descent, only a very small minority can claim fluency in both oral and written Ukrainian.

The problem is not only restricted to the diaspora. In Ukraine itself, the issue of language has played a prominent role in the political debates of the last decade. During the Soviet era, the Russians made a determined and relentless effort to make Russian the universal language of the Soviet Union, discouraging through both overt and tacit means the use of indigenous languages. The legacy, particularly in Eastern Ukraine, was devastating. East of the Dnipro river, despite recent efforts to bolster and re-invigorate the national language, Russian still predominates as the common language of a majority of the population.

Strengthening the Ukrainian language has become one of the main priorities of the Ukrainian government since independence. Yet the problem has more dimensions than most of us appreciate. The most elemental issue is defining what exactly constitutes the Ukrainian language in the first place. One of the common complaints we hear at this paper from recent immigrants is that we do not speak or write “proper” Ukrainian. The Ukrainian that we use here is derived primarily from that spoken and written by those immigrants that arrived in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Even in the short space of some fifty years, there has been a significance evolutionary divergence between the Ukrainian spoken here and that spoken in Ukraine. In Ukraine itself, there are significant differences between the Ukrainian spoken in Western or Galician Ukraine and that spoken in Central and Eastern Ukraine. The former reflects the influences derived from its history as part of the Polish and Austro-Hungarian empires, while the latter shows the strong influence of the Russian dominance of that part of the country. A government commission has been working for years to try and define what constitutes “official” Ukrainian, though I suspect it will be some time before there is agreement and acceptance on this issue.

The problem of language is not new. The Ukrainian language has had a tough time throughout history and debates and conflict have been common. For most of its existence, Ukrainian was not even recognized as an official language. The Poles and the Russians have maintained even unto relatively modern times that it was just an uncultured dialect of their own tongues. It was also primarily an oral language, as it was not until the eighteen hundreds that a consistent written and literary form came into general usage throughout the linguistic territory of Ukraine. This came about through the persistent efforts of such writers as Shaskevych, Holovatsky and Vahylevych (known as the Ruthenian Triad) in Western Ukraine and Kotliarevsky, Shevchenko and Franko in the Russian occupied part.

Ironically, some of the strongest opposition to the establishment of the commonly used vernacular spoken by the people as a written literary language came from the church. At that time, virtually all the Ukrainian intelligentsia came from the clergy, as that was the only means of gaining an education at that time. The church at that time employed old Church Slavonic for both its services and in all its writings, despite the fact that few people outside the clergy really understood it. They considered the common Ukrainian language spoken by the people as too vulgar for use in either religious practice or for any serious literary endeavours. As an added complication, in Western Ukraine, probably due to the strong Polish influence, there was considerable support in the early 1800’s among many educated Ukrainians to adopt the Latin alphabet for the written form of Ukrainian. Eventually, the written form of Ukrainian that we are all familiar with today came to be generally accepted some one hundred and fifty years ago.

However the Ukrainian language may evolve in the coming decades and centuries, what is certain is that with the existence of an independent Ukrainian state, its future prospects are stronger than they have ever been. To be sure, there are no shortages of threats and challenges, but, I think if it managed to survive for half a millennium under the most severe repression, then with Ukrainians finally being masters in their own house, we can all breathe a little easier about its future.