Authors

Discussion

Taking Danylenko’s (2015) socio-typological classification of new standard Ukrainian as its springboard, this paper offers an analysis of a language of the 19th–20th c Kryvorivnja (Hutsul) parish register books. The Kryvorivnja dialect of Hutsul of Southwest Ukrainian is spoken in a village located in the Carpathian Mountains. In the early 20th c, the village of Kryvorivnja was known as ‘Ukrainian Athens’ owing to its regular visitors, that is, famous Ukrainian writers, politicians, and political activists from Austro-Hungarian-ruled and Russian-ruled Ukraine who stayed there primarily during summer. 

I submit that November 1, 1918 may be taken as a turning point in the history of languages the 1871–1944 Kryvorivnja records were conducted in. This first consistent shift from Latin to Ukrainian introduced in 1918 by the parish priest Oleksa Voljans’kyj coincides with the day the West Ukrainian People’s Republic authority in Lviv was established. The language of the parish registers extant from 1918–1944 mostly attests to the Galician-Bukovynian sub-variety of the West Ukrainian regional variety of standard Ukrainian and represents a tendency towards East Ukrainian admixtures. All this confirms that at that time standard Ukrainian was actively broadening “its dialectal base from Southeast to North to Southwest Ukrainian” (Danylenko, A. 2015. How many varieties of standard Ukrainian does one need? Welt der Slaven, 60, p. 236).