The history of the Ukrainian language
How old is Ukrainian? What languages is it similar to? Did Ukrainians speak Ukrainian during Soviet times? Read this post to learn the short history of the Ukrainian language.
What language does Ukrainian come from?
Ukrainian, like many other Slavic languages (Polish, Belarussian, Russian, Czech, Slovakian, Serbian, Croatian, etc.), comes from a Proto-Slavic language. There is no written evidence of Proto-Slavic. Scientists have reconstructed it through a comparison of various languages. It is descended from the Baltic languages, and scholars say that it was spoken in Eastern and Central Europe up to the 7th-8th (some even include the 10th-11th) centuries.
In the 6th century, Slavic tribes came in contact with the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, and it is when the first Slavic written words appeared in Greek written texts.
However, it was only by the end of the 9th century that the first texts in the Old Church Slavonic appeared. The Old Church Slavonic is the first Slavic language that existed in the written form.
The Old Church Slavonic is based on the dialects spoken in Greek Macedonia. Why? It is because there were two Greek saints from Thessalonica, Cyril and Methodius, who spoke those dialects and served as Christian missionaries to spread Christianity among Slavs. That is how some Greek interwove in the Slavic languages.
Most features of Slavic languages were established by the end of the 10th century.
How old is Ukrainian?
In 12-13th centuries, Ukrainian already differed from other languages. We do not know how people spoke at that time. We only know some formal language from church documents and other official papers. The only example of street talk is graffiti in a St. Sophia cathedral (Kyiv). Looking at them, linguists say that these two «dialects» (the written language of church/other formal documents and the street language) differed so much that we might even claim them to be two different languages. (Here are a photo report and an article about Kyiv's St. Sophia cathedral and its graffiti.)
What languages has Ukrainian borrowed some of its words from?
This map shows where some of the Ukrainian words have come from. It is a page from the book by Тищенко "Іншомовна історія українців".
Like any other language, Ukrainian has formed under the influence of other languages.
When Christianity came to the Ukrainian territory, Ukrainian absorbed a lot of Greek words (Біблія, ікона, ангел, демократія, etc.). A Slavic alphabet was made based on Greek letters.
Tribes from the step region enriched Ukrainian with Turkic words (кавун, гарбуз, килим, козак, etc.). Contacts with the Crimean Khanate had just enforced this process.
In the big cities, due to Jesuit schools, Latin words enriched the Ukrainian language (абітурієнт, студент, факультет, лекція, etc.).
In Ukrainian, there are quite a few words loaned from Yiddish (гаманець, шахрай, ґанок, праска, etc.).
Ukrainian has also taken words from Polish (пан), German (дах), Hungarian (шабля), Romanian (бринза), etc.
When was the modern Ukrainian born?
Up to the 18th century, the development of Ukrainian slowed. Ukrainian speakers were controlled by other countries (Rzeczpospolita and Russia), and the governments of those countries regulated the usage of Ukrainian.
At the end of the 18th and in the 19th century, as a reaction to the oppression, there was the upsurge of the Ukrainian nationalism. In the 19th century, they published «Енеїда» by Kotliarevsky and Shevchenko’s poems. These authors used spoken Ukrainian to write a literary work. Dante did the same: he wrote The Divine Comedy in the spoken language of the Toscana region, and this dialect, due to literature, became the basis of the literary Italian.
In the second part of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, in the west of Ukraine, there remained Ukrainian regions not under Russian control. So, they continued to publish Ukrainian books there, and some words from the western region enriched the literary Ukrainian (e.g. розвиток, властивість, переважно, штучний, чемний, etc.).
Here's a video about the history of the Ukrainian language. There's also an extensive and well-illustrated article about that.
Did Ukrainians speak Ukrainian during the Soviet Union days?
In the 1920s, when the USSR started to control Ukraine (before that, Ukraine was under two other empires – the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian ones), they launched the first wave of «Ukrainization». Bolsheviks wanted to calm down anti-Soviet protests among Ukrainians and started to promote the Ukrainian language and culture.
However, not long after that, in 1930s, Bolsheviks started repressions and the «unification» of the Ukrainian language with the Russian one. They even changed the traditional Ukrainian grammar for it to be more similar to the Russian one (e.g. they decided to say «двохповерховий будинок» (in Russian, it is «двухэтажный») instead of «двоповерховий», they started to spell «Європа» (which is closer to the Russian pronunciation) instead of «Европа», they dismissed letter Ґ, and got rid of the «Polish and Czech bourgeois influence in the Ukrainian language».
However, this policy had a positive consequence. After Stalin died in 1953 when more freedom was allowed, in the 1960s, a new generation of Ukrainian activists arose who had been young in the 1920s, at the times of «Ukrainization». For these people, Ukraine was more than «just a territory». So, they started to promote the Ukrainian culture again.
In the mid-1960s, Ukrainian billboards appeared in Kyiv, and the police and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine answered the phone in Ukrainian. They started to publish books and dub films in Ukrainian. Ukrainian rock bands were created («Березень», «Еней» and others). They opened Ukrainian restaurants, and my grandma bought a culinary book «Українські страви» («Ukrainian dishes») with lots of Ukrainian recipes and a Ukrainian family on the cover (they wear vyshyvanka and have a wall picture of Bohdan Khmelnytsky's monument in Kyiv). One of the most popular Ukrainian poetess, Lina Kostenko, also started her poetic career in 1960s.
A book of Ukrainian recipes my grandmother used to cook by.
Of course, Ukrainian cities and scientists spoke mainly Russian, especially in the east, south and center. But villagers still communicated in Ukrainian (even in more russificated regions).
It is Kharkiv in 1959 through the lens of Lawrence Monthey. A shop sign "Держфото" in cursive (an abbreviation from "Державне фото"/"The State Photo(studio)") is in Ukrainian.
In the 1960s and later, the unified Soviet culture (which was a kind of the Russian imperialistic culture) was fighting (and frequently winning over) a Ukrainian Soviet culture (with some blend of Ukrainian anti-Soviet culture).
But later, in 1989-1991, people who graduated from school in the 1970s became those who started rebuilding a new, independent Ukraine and reviving the Ukrainian culture.
If you are interested in the history of the Ukrainian linguicide, here is a timeline about it. If you want to know what the current language situation in Ukraine is like, read this post about that.
Are you looking for teacher’s tips on Ukrainian learning? Check out the blog. If you are interested in Ukrainian online courses, see here what I offer. If you're looking for engaging Ukrainian lessons that you can take anytime, see them here.