New Contributions to the History of the Ukrainian Language

Description

Michael Moser’s New Contributions to the History of the Ukrainian Language is a collection of scholarly essays that examine the development of Ukrainian from its beginnings to the present. In 1863 the imperial Russian minister of the interior, Petr Valuev, issued a directive according to which Ukrainian is “a language that did not, does not, and cannot exist,” but time has not borne out his verdict. As these collected essays demonstrate, Ukrainian is a language with an intriguing past, present, and future. Contrary to widespread belief, its historical roots are as deep as those of any other Slavic language. The development of the Ukrainian language, like any other, has been a complex interplay of autochthonous factors and external influences. Moser discusses selected aspects of the history of Ukrainian-Church Slavonic, Ukrainian-Polish, and Ukrainian-Russian language contacts as reflected in Ukrainian written sources. He shows that the elaboration of Modern Standard Ukrainian was the result of intricate efforts of codification carried out under specific historical circumstances. The essays address specific problems of the history of the Ukrainian language in Galicia, Transcarpathia, and North America and discuss the impact of government policy on the more recent history of the Ukrainian language.