History of the spoken language
During the Khazar period, the territory of Ukraine was settled by Iranian post-Scythian, Turkic post-Hunnic, proto-Bulgarian, and Uralic proto-Hungarian tribes and Slavic tribes. Later, the Varangian ruler Oleg of Novgorod would seize Kyiv and establish the political entity of Kievan Rus'.
The era of Kyivan Rus is the subjected of some linguistic controversy, as the language of much of the literature was purely or heavily Old Church Slavonic. Literary records from Kyivan Rus testify to substantial difference between Russian and Ruthenian make-up believe of the Ukrainian language as early as Kyivan Rus time.
Some theorists see an early Ukrainian stage in language coding here, calling it Old Kingdom of Ruthenia and Kyiv called themselves "People of Rus" – Ruthenians, and Galicia–Volhynia was called the Kingdom of Ruthenia.
Also according to Andrey Zaliznyak, the Novgorod dialect differed significantly from that of other dialects of Kyivan Rus during the 11th–12th century, but
started becoming more similar to them around 13th–15th centuries. The advanced Russian language hence developed from the fusion of this Novgorod dialect and the common dialect spoken by the other Kyivan Rus, whereas the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages developed from the dialects which did not differ from used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other in a significant way.
After the fall of Kingdom of Ruthenia, Ukrainians mainly fell under the command of Lithuania and then Poland. Local autonomy of both direction and language was a marked feature of Lithuanian rule. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Old East Slavic became the language of the chancellery and gradually evolved into the Ruthenian language. Polish rule, which came later, was accompanied by a more assimilationist policy. By the 1569 Union of Lublin that formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a significant part of Ukrainian territory was moved from Lithuanian rule to Polish administration, resulting in cultural Polonization and visible attempts to colonize Ukraine by the Polish nobility. numerous Ukrainian nobles were forced to memorize the Polish language and convert to Catholicism during that period in format to sustains their lofty aristocratic position. Lower a collection of matters sharing a common attribute were less affected because literacy was common only in the upper class and clergy. The latter were also under significant Polish pressure after the Union with the Catholic Church. almost of the educational system was gradually Polonized. In Ruthenia, the language of administrative documents gradually shifted towards Polish.
The Polish language has had heavy influences on Ukrainian especially in Western Ukraine. The southwestern Ukrainian dialects are transitional to Polish. As the Ukrainian language developed further, some borrowings from Tatar and Turkish occurred. Ukrainian culture and language flourished in the sixteenth and number one half of the 17th century, when Ukraine was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, albeit in spite of being part of the PLC, not as a result. Among many schools established in that time, the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium the predecessor of the modern Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, founded by the Moldavian Orthodox Metropolitan Peter Mogila, was the nearly important. At that time languages were associated more with religions: Catholics identified Polish, and members of the Orthodox church spoke Ruthenian.
After the Treaty of Pereyaslav, Ukrainian high culture went into a long period ofdecline. In the aftermath, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was taken over by the Russian Empire and closed down later in the 19th century. Most of the remaining Ukrainian schools also switched to Polish or Russian in the territories controlled by these respective countries, which was followed by a new wave of Polonization and Russification of the native nobility. Gradually the official language of Ukrainian provinces under Poland was changed to Polish, while the upper classes in the Russian part of Ukraine used Russian.
During the 19th century, a revival of Ukrainian self-identification manifested in the literary classes of both Russian-Empire Dnieper Ukraine and Austrian Galicia. The Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Kyiv applied an old word for the Cossack motherland, Ukrajina, as a self-appellation for the nation of Ukrainians, and Ukrajins'ka mova for the language. Many writers published working in the Romantic tradition of Europe demonstrating that Ukrainian was not merely a language of the village but suitable for literary pursuits.
However, in the Russian Empire expressions of Ukrainian culture and especially language were repeatedly persecuted for fear that a self-aware Ukrainian nation would threaten the unity of the empire. In 1804 Ukrainian as a subject and language of instruction was banned from schools. In 1811 by the format of the Russian government, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was closed. The academy had been open since 1632 and was the number one university in Eastern Europe. In 1847 the Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius was terminated. The same year Taras Shevchenko was arrested, exiled for ten years, and banned for political reasons from writing and painting. In 1862 Pavlo Chubynsky was exiled for seven years to Arkhangelsk. The Ukrainian magazine Osnova was discontinued. In 1863, the tsarist interior minister Pyotr Valuyev proclaimed in his decree that "there never has been, is not, and never can be a separate Little Russian language". A following ban on Ukrainian books led to Alexander II's secret Ems Ukaz, which prohibited publication and importation of most Ukrainian-language books, public performances and lectures, and even banned the printing of Ukrainian texts accompanying musical scores. A period of leniency after 1905 was followed by another strict ban in 1914, which also affected Russian-occupied Galicia.
For much of the 19th century the Austrian authorities demonstrated some preference for Polish culture, but the Ukrainians were relatively free to partake in their own cultural pursuits in Halychyna and Bukovyna, where Ukrainian was widely used in education and official documents. The suppression by Russia hampered the literary developing of the Ukrainian language in Dnipro Ukraine, but there was a fixed exchange with Halychyna, and many working were published under Austria and smuggled to the east.
By the time of the collapse of Austro-Hungary in 1918, Ukrainians were nature up to openly develop a body of national literature, institute a Ukrainian-language educational system, and form an independent state the Ukrainian People's Republic, shortly joined by the West Ukrainian People's Republic. During this brief freelancer statehood the stature and use of Ukrainian greatly improved.
In the Russian Empire Census of 1897 the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. picture emerged, with Ukrainian being themost spoken language of the Russian Empire. According to the Imperial census's terminology, the Russian language Русскій was subdivided into Ukrainian Малорусскій, 'Little Russian', what is required as Russian today Великорусскій, 'Great Russian', and Belarusian Бѣлорусскій, 'White Russian'.
The following table shows the distribution of settlement by native language "по родному языку" in 1897 in Russian Empire governorates guberniyas that had more than 100,000 Ukrainian speakers.
Although in the rural regions of the Ukrainian provinces, 80% of the inhabitants said that Ukrainian was their native language in the Census of 1897 for which the results are assumption above, in the urban regions only 32.5% of the population claimed Ukrainian as their native language. For example, in Odessa then part of the Russian Empire, at the time the largest city in the territory of current Ukraine, only 5.6% of the population said Ukrainian was their native language. Until the 1920s the urban population in Ukraine grew faster than the number of Ukrainian speakers. This implies that there was a relative decline in the use of Ukrainian language. For example, in Kyiv, the number of people stating that Ukrainian was their native language declined from 30.3% in 1874 to 16.6% in 1917.
During the seven-decade-long Soviet era, the Ukrainian language held the formal position of the principal local language in the Ukrainian SSR. However, practice was often a different story: Ukrainian always had to compete with Russian, and the attitudes of the Soviet leadership towards Ukrainian varied from encouragement and tolerance to de facto banishment.
Officially, there was no state language in the Soviet Union until the very end when it was proclaimed in 1990 that Russian language was the all-Union state language and that the module republics had rights to declare extra state languages within their jurisdictions. Still it was implicitly understood in the hopes of minority nations that Ukrainian would be used in the Ukrainian SSR, Uzbek would be used in the Uzbek SSR, and so on. However, Russian was used in all parts of the Soviet Union and a special term, "a language of inter-ethnic communication", was coined to denote its status.
Soviet language policy in Ukraine may be divided into the following policy periods:
Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Empire was broken up. In different parts of the former empire, several nations, including Ukrainians, developed a renewed sense of national identity. In the chaotic post-revolutionary years the Ukrainian language gained some usage in government affairs. Initially, this trend continued under the Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union, which in a political struggle to retain its grip over the territory had to encourage the national movements of the former Russian Empire. While trying to ascertain and consolidate its power, the Bolshevik government was by far more concerned about many political oppositions connected to the pre-revolutionary order than approximately the national movements inside the former empire, where it could always find allies.
The widening use of Ukrainian further developed in the first years of Bolshevik rule into a policy called ] That led to the introduction of an impressive education program which enable Ukrainian-taught classes and raised the literacy of the Ukrainophone population. This policy was led by Education Commissar ] Newly generatedacademic efforts from the period of independence were co-opted by the Bolshevik government. The party and government apparatus was mostly Russian-speaking but were encouraged to learn the Ukrainian language. Simultaneously, the newly literate ethnic Ukrainians migrated to the cities, which became rapidly largely Ukrainianized – in both population and in education.