Rusyn Language on the Territories of Central Europe

Author

BELEY LIUBOMYR

a Doctor of Philology, a professor at Ukrainian Language Department of the Uzhhorod National University, a director of the Mykhaylo Molnar Ukrainian Studies Research Institute

RusynLanguage on the Territories of Central Europe

Abstract

During the past decade, Neo-Rusyns have focused their attention on linguistic issues: they have been trying to prove the singularity of Rusyn language. Over this period, there were published more than 20 Rusyn dictionaries, among which there were both two-volume and four- or six-volume editions. As our study of lexicographic production of Neo-Rusyns has showed, the publication of dictionaries turns out to be a manipulative technology created to foster an illusion of richness of Rusyn language; therefore, most dictionaries under consideration have a register of 50 ths to 250 ths words. However, a comparative analysis of Rusyn and Ukrainian dictionaries shows that dictionaries declared as Rusyn contain 90–95 % of Ukrainian lexicon, with the vast majority of it being of literary origin. Authors of numerous Rusyn grammars published during the early XXIst century, without having an ability to find any structural differences between Ukrainian and Rusyn languages, have been concentrating all their heed on questions of spelling (variants of the Rusyn alphabet range from 32 to 38 letters), as well as on grammatical terminology. They contrive bizarre names for cases, parts of speech, tenses, and classifications. For example, instead of four Ukrainian declensions of nouns, they propose to distinguish from 16 up to 31 declinations of Rusyn nouns. It is noteworthy that the Slovakian Rusyns, having achieved the official recognition of Rusyn language in Slovakia, abandoned their original division of nouns into 16 declensions and reverted to the conventional four-case system. Apart from its undisguised terminological and classification manipulations, the Rusyn linguistic literature contains numerous amateurish, even ignorant statements and interpretations: in his preface to the Phrasebook of Rusyn language, Yu. Chori states that there isnot only many-word but also one-word Rusyn phrase.

Keywords

Rusyn language, Lemky’s language, Neorusyns, standard language, orthography, lexicography.

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