Rothstein named to commission on Rusyn language

Comparative literature professor Robert A. Rothstein is one of four international scholars named to a commission to oversee continued work on creating a single standard Rusyn language.

The appointment was made at the Third International Congress on the Rusyn Language held Sept. 13-16 at the Pedagogical Academy (Akademia Pedagogiczna) in Kraków, Poland. Participants and observers, including linguists, teachers, writers, journalists and cultural activists came from Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Estonia, Great Britain, Canada and the United States.

The congress established an inter-regional commission to oversee continued work on creating a single standard Rusyn language. The commission will consist of two members (one linguist and one “practitioner”) from each of the four Rusyn regions plus Hungary, The regional members are to be selected through consultation in each area. Appointed with Rothstein as outside members were Henryk Fontanski of the University of Silesia, Poland; Juraj Vaňko of the University of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra, Slovakia; and Stefan M. Pugh of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

According to Rothstein, the Rusyns, or Carpatho-Rusyns, whose historical homeland stretches along both sides of the Carpathian Mountains, are linguistically most closely related to Ukrainians. Some Carpatho-Rusyns view themselves as speakers of a Ukrainian dialect and as members of a Ukrainian ethnic group, while others consider themselves to be a fourth east Slavic nationality alongside Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians.

Before World War I most Rusyns lived within the borders of the Hungarian Kingdom. Between the two world wars the majority of Rusyns lived in Subcarpathian Rus′, the easternmost province of Czechoslovakia, which was annexed to the Soviet Ukraine after the Second World War. Today Rusyns mostly live in the Transcarpathian Region (Zakarpats′ka oblast′) of Ukraine and in eastern Slovakia, with smaller numbers in northern Serbia and northern Croatia, Hungary and Romania. According to the 2002 census there are some 6,000 Rusyns who identify themselves as such living in Poland, where they are known as Lemkos (Łemkowie). They were given the name “Lemko” by their neighbors because they use the word lem to mean “only.” The Lemkos are recognized in Poland as an official ethnic minority, as opposed to the Ukrainians living in Poland (some 27,000 according to the 2002 census), who are recognized as an official national minority. According to Polish law national minorities differ from ethnic minorities in that the former are identical to a group (nationality) that has its own state, while the latter are not.

The official Soviet policy was to deny the existence of a Rusyn nationality, declaring all Rusyns to be Ukrainians. It was only after the breakup of the U.S.S.R. and the changes in Eastern and Central Europe that it became possible for a case to be made once again for a separate Rusyn language and nationality. One of the first issues for Rusyn activists was standardization of the language. In November, 1992 the First International Scholarly Seminar on the Codification of the Rusyn Language was held in Bardejovské Kúpele in Slovakia. The decision was made to start by developing standards for four different variants of Rusyn (for Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and former Yugoslavia), with the ultimate goal of melding the four regional standards into one general standard.

By the time of the Second International Scholarly Seminar on the Rusyn Language, held in Presov, Slovakia, in 1999, considerable progress had been made toward achieving a standard for Slovak Rusyn. Yugoslav Rusyn had long had a standard, which was used in the former Yugoslavia and is used in the successor states of Serbia and Croatia in schools, newspapers and other publications, and on radio and television. Some initial work had been done toward creating a standard language for the Lemkos of Poland, but little had been achieved in Ukraine.

The task of the Kraków Congress was to sum up the achievements to date and to look toward moving from regional standards toward a single all-Rusyn standard language. The opening plenary session bore the title “The Status of the Rusyn Language since the 2nd International Congress on the Rusyn Language in 1999 in the Eyes of Prominent Slavists.”

The “prominent Slavists” – from Canada, Slovakia, the United States, Great Britain and Estonia – spoke in Rusyn or Russian on general topics: the goals of the Congress, the creation of interregional standards, Latin and non-Latin alphabets in the modern world (the Rusyns use the cyrillic alphabet), the problem of foreign loan words and the survival of “micro-languages” in the modern world.

The rest of the congress was devoted to more specialized topics: current problems of standardization in the individual regions; the use of the Rusyn language in specific functional areas (administration, literature, religion, theater, the press and literary translation); the use of Rusyn in the educational systems of particular countries; and the creation of an all-Rusyn norm.

October 23, 2007.

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