"Little Russian"
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In "Give Elfdalian, Haitian, Limburgish, Patois, Ukrainian and, yes, Black English their due", NYT (3/11/22), John McWhorter writes:
It was long ago common for Russians to regard Ukrainian as just a dialect of Russian. “Little Russian,” it was called. Writing for The Conversation this week, Florida International University’s Phillip Carter said, “If you ask some Russian nationalists, Ukrainian isn’t a language at all,” noting that in the 1863 Valuev Circular, Pyotr Valuev, Russia’s interior minister, decreed that a separate Ukrainian language did not exist.
Ukrainian is indeed closely related to Russian — they both use a Cyrillic alphabet and have similar grammatical patterns — but Russian it is not. Through the auspices of my own nerdish obsession with language and opportunities to practice within a personal relationship, on a good day I can grasp maybe about half of what Russians are saying to each other in conversation if the topic isn’t too sophisticated. But years ago, when I moved to a neighborhood in Jersey City, I found that I couldn’t catch a single word of what my “Russian” neighbors were saying until it occurred to me that they weren’t speaking Russian at all. It was, rather, the distinct language Ukrainian.
McWhorter does the same sort of housecleaning for the other languages (yes, languages) named in the title. I can well imagine what he would do with the plethora of mutually unintelligible topolects in China.
Selected readings
- "Japanese orthography of Ukrainian city names" (3/1/22)
- "Can't work because of the Ukraine crisis" (2/25/22)
- "Ukrainian is not Russian" (7/26/21)
- "What're Ukraine About?" (3/6/14)
[h.t. Mark Metcalf]
Leslie Katz said,
March 17, 2022 @ 12:17 pm
A language is a dialect with an army. Ukraine has an army. QED.
Phillip Minden said,
March 17, 2022 @ 12:39 pm
Little Russia is a misunderstanding, albeit an old one. I've long been telling people this is better rendered as Core or Inner Rus', the Rus' being centred in Kyiv, while Novgorod or Moscow are in the Outer Rus'. Or Marginal Russia.
Jim Breen said,
March 17, 2022 @ 2:40 pm
I have the $1/week online subscription to the NY Times. McWhorter's newsletter is one of the things that make it worthwhile.
Martin Schwartz said,
March 17, 2022 @ 2:57 pm
I think Pokorny still has "Kleinrussisch". Let's not forget
Belarussian, lit. "White Russian" (formerly also called
"White Ruthenian".
Martin Schwartz
Victor Mair said,
March 17, 2022 @ 3:14 pm
Egypt has an army, but it doesn't have a language. The same is true of many other vernaculars in the Arab world and in many other parts of the world.
Let's retire that old canard.
D.O. said,
March 17, 2022 @ 4:24 pm
Rural Russian and Ukrainian probably form a dialect continuum. But literary Russian (exists at least since 18th c.) and Ukrainian (since 19c., Valuev be damned) are reasonably different.
Philip Anderson said,
March 17, 2022 @ 6:48 pm
The USA doesn’t have its own language, nor does any country in the Americas (except for creoles).
Peter B. Golden said,
March 17, 2022 @ 7:17 pm
"Little Russia" Малороссия was a usage taken from Byzantine Patriarchal documents: Μικρὰ Ῥωσία from the 14th century. Northern Rus', i.e. Russia, was called Μεγάλη Ῥωσσία "Great Rus'". Its use was for ecclesiastical purposes, i.e. the different metropolitanates that developed with the breakup of Rus' as a result of the Mongol conquest and the Lithuanian conquest (of Belarus' "White Rus'"~Western Rus'). The term Малороссия was reintroduced in the 17th century. D.O is correct rural, in this instance southern Russian forms a dialect continuum with Ukrainian. Similar continuums exist between Russian and Belarusian. The classic tale is that ethnographers were trying to determine the boundaries between Belarusian and Russian. In one village in the border area they asked an old man: "are you Russian or Belarusian?" He looked at them quizzically and responded "я тутейший" [I'm from here]. I have heard the speech from people in the Chernobyl' region and was struck by how close it was to my grandfather's speech in accent and vocabulary (he was from Belarus'). The village he was from and the town in which he grew up were part of the Riurikid Principality of Chernigov/Chernihiv of Old Rus', as was Chernobyl'. It is likely that the dialect continuum is at least that old. Belarusian and Ukrainian share some lexical elements (from Polish) that are not found in Russian.
Brett said,
March 17, 2022 @ 7:45 pm
Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony is known by the nickname "Little Russian," since the composer used a number of Ukrainian folk tunes as a basis for some of the melodies.
Jenny Chu said,
March 17, 2022 @ 7:52 pm
Here's a slightly different take: I went to Ukraine in the early 1990s. I had a fairly good grounding in Russian (thank you, Horace Lunt!) and had grabbed a Ukrainian phrase book before I left.
I noted and adopted all of the obvious differences (g -> h, хорошо -> добре, etc. … and I am a pretty good accent mimic in general) and then muddled through. Result: I got many compliments on my excellent "Ukrainian" as a result and was never taken to be speaking Russian. One person said she assumed I was from the Baltics because I had made the effort to learn Ukrainian rather than just learning Russian.
Incidentally, I got away with almost the same thing when I went to Slovakia having studied Czech. Change the common endings and frequently used phrases, and presto change-o, you're taken to be an earnest student of Slovak.
Q. said,
March 17, 2022 @ 10:48 pm
What's interesting about Ukraine and Belarus is the outcomes of their language policies. While in Belarus the Belarusian language is close to moribund by now (it is actively used by 11.9% of people in 2009, a huge drop from 36.7% in 1999), in Ukraine their language is pretty stable and even takes over once largely Russianized areas like Kyiv. At their starting point they somewhat resembled Taiwan, where most people, especially those living in the South, consider Taiwanese Hokkien to be their mother tongue, but only ~30% of them use it primarily, and ~55% more use it as a secondary language, after more prestige Mandarin.
Ukrainians enforce more proactive measures to promote their language, e.g. they have laws setting minimum amount of Ukrainian content on TV and radio, demanding clerks to start conversations in Ukrainian (while it's allowed to use Russian later on if the client would like), and so on. For Russia, though, this is a huge propaganda point, they portray it as discrimination against the Russian-speaking population. Russian and rebel officials largely blame the language policy for inciting this conflict. Now after the invasion, the Ukrainian is only gaining popularity, and even Russian-speaking people who used to be skeptical about all that 'nation-building' efforts start to use it more and more.
Keith said,
March 18, 2022 @ 2:16 am
I visited Ukraine in the early – mid 1990s while I was studying in Moscow, staying mainly in the city now known as Kamianske in the eastern Dneprodzerzhinska oblast, but with trips to other cities (the ones I remember best are Kryvyi Rih and Kyiv).
The language there, in my memory, is very similar to Russian, but with some very visible differences in vocabulary. For example watermelon is кавун, a loanword from Turkish, rather than арбуз and the sign on a newspaper kiosk reads друкать rather than печать.
I generally had no problem in conversation, because many people were bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian or were exclusively Russophones.
As another poster has pointed out, I found that dropping characteristically Ukrainian words into mostly Russian speech got me lots of brownie points for having made what was seen to be a big effort to learn the local language.
On the subject of the language continuum, and the response "я тутейший" [I'm from here] cited by another poster, we have to remember that the boundaries around the states in Eastern Europe have been shifted around as the territories belong to one empire or another…
A town that used to be in Germany can now be in Poland, and one that used to be in Poland is now in Ukraine.
The formalisation of a national language, usually based on the language of the national capital, and then the uniform teaching of that standard across the state is a big force in creating a language and diminishing that language continuum.
NSBK said,
March 18, 2022 @ 6:22 am
Regarding shifting (demolished?) territory boundaries and languages of countries in the Americas — I feel compelled to point out that a great many peoples lived on these continents with entire families of languages before Europeans "discovered" it, and several of those languages are still spoken in some form today.
Andreas Johansson said,
March 18, 2022 @ 7:17 am
The only native language of the Americas that even arguably has a navy would be Guaraní, though.
Keith Gaughan said,
March 18, 2022 @ 7:30 am
One country in the Americas does have its own language, and that's Paraguay, given it's spoken by a majority of the country's population.
John Swindle said,
March 18, 2022 @ 7:47 am
American Sign Language, Mexican Sign Language, and Guaraní are each associated with a particular American country and used throughout that country. No? But not necessarily the dominant language there. May no wars take place to protect ASL users in Mexico or MSL users in the United States.
John Swindle said,
March 18, 2022 @ 7:56 am
I hadn't seen Andreas Johansson's comment. (I dawdled over mine.) Had I seen it I would have said "… and, yes, Guaraní". Remarkable, though, that we both thought of that language.
KeithB said,
March 18, 2022 @ 8:59 am
"Egypt has an army, but it doesn't have a language. "
Didn't we just have an article about how various versions of Arabic are not mutually intelligible?
"The USA doesn’t have its own language, nor does any country in the Americas "
Don't forget the tribes and pueblos. Many of them have their own police force.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 18, 2022 @ 10:44 am
The "with an army" thing only applies to language varieties close enough to a more politically/culturally dominant one that they can be characterized with a semi-straight face as a deviant/substandard dialect of the latter. Whatever Russian nationalists may have said about Ukrainian in that regard, they have never claimed that e.g. Chuvash or Mordvin are merely deviant/substandard Russian. Similarly a certain sort of Spanish nationalist might claim that Catalan is merely bad Castillian, but could not and would not make the same claim about Basque.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 18, 2022 @ 10:53 am
To go back to McWhorter's personal-experience example, assume someone with a non-English L1 whose primary exposure to spoken English had been in Canada and who had gotten to the point where on a good day he could grasp about half of what Anglophone Canadians were saying to each other if the topic wasn't too sophisticated. It would not surprise me if you could plop that same person into some other part of the "English-speaking world" where the local "dialect" was quite different (nominations are in order: rural South Carolina? Glasgow? Some out-of-the-way part of the West Indies?) and have that 50% level of comprehension drop close to zero.
The existence of a different formal written standard headquartered in Kyiv – and rather more dramatically different than e.g. U.S. v. U.K. spelling differences, with newspapers and book publishers using the Kyiv-centric standard, and a Ministry of Education and other bureaucrats enforcing its use in various contexts, strikes me as more significant in differentiating "Ukrainian" and "Russian" as different "languages" rather than simply overlapping arbitrarily-labeled ranges on a single dialect continuum.
David Marjanović said,
March 18, 2022 @ 11:21 am
Roughly speaking, Poland drifted east for a thousand years, and then Stalin suddenly put it back to where it had come from.
That reminds me of German and Dutch. The border between Germany and the Netherlands lies at a right angle to a whole series of isoglosses; Central Franconian, Low Franconian and Low Saxon dialects are spoken on both sides – but Standard Dutch is pretty unambiguously Low Franconian, while Standard German has a much more complex history and is something vaguely like Upper Franconian on average.
Victor Mair said,
March 18, 2022 @ 11:39 am
@KeithB
Yes, indeed. We had a whole series of posts on that very subject.
Alexander Pruss said,
March 18, 2022 @ 2:52 pm
I know that Ukrainian and Russian are East Slavic, and Polish is West Slavic, but various online sources (e.g., Wikipedia, s.v. Ukrainian language) say that Ukrainian is actually closer to Polish than to Russian. Anybody know about what metrics of lexical and grammatical similarity say on this?
I can't tell myself. It's hard for me in reading not to be biased by the alphabet which makes it look more like Russian than Polish. (L1 Polish, learned to read Russian in grad school, never studied Ukrainian.)
Joshua K. said,
March 18, 2022 @ 4:34 pm
I wish John McWhorter hadn't used "they both use a Cyrillic alphabet" as evidence that Russian and Ukrainian are closely related. I mean, English, Vietnamese, and Finnish all use Latin alphabets, but none of them are related to each other, whereas Hindi and Urdu use different writing systems from each other yet are closely related.
I know that McWhorter is aware of this, but some of his readers might have taken him too literally to mean that using the same alphabet means that languages are related, or that not using the same alphabet means that languages are not related.
Dara Connolly said,
March 18, 2022 @ 6:31 pm
я тутейший = "I'm from here"
This caught my eye as it is reminiscent of the Irish word "tuath" originally meaning "tribe" or "people", and also Lithuanian "tauta" meaning country (not to mention the name of the god Toutatis frequently invoked by Asterix). Is this Slavic word related in some way or is it a coincidence?
Philip Anderson said,
March 18, 2022 @ 7:01 pm
@J.W. Brewer
A good many non-British (or even British) Anglophones can’t understand a broad Glasgow accent.
John Swindle said,
March 18, 2022 @ 9:31 pm
@Dara Connolly: For me “я тутейший” and the examples you cite call to mind words like “deutsch” and “Dutch” and “Teutonic.”
Alexander Pruss said,
March 18, 2022 @ 10:23 pm
Was that "тутэйший" or actually "тутейший"?
The Wikipedia entry for "tutejszy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutejszy) suggests that while "from here" is a correct literal translation, it may be kind of a term of art, "a self-identification of Eastern European rural populations, who did not have a clear national identity".
Table XI of the 1922 Polish census (http://statlibr.stat.gov.pl/exlibris/aleph/a22_1/apache_media/81QB7CFELH8SBCE3HAX9HCEJA8X337.pdf) lists "tutejsza" as one of the nationality options, translated into French as "indigène". On the one hand, it's included between "rosyjska" and "czeska" (I don't know what the order in the list is; it's neither in terms of population size nor alphabetical), rather than among the last columns which are "inna" (other) and "niewiadoma" (unknown), which makes it sound like an actual ethnic identity. On the other hand, there is a footnote to "tutejszy/indigène" that says "Population non sachant pas définir sa nationalité".
Terpomo said,
March 19, 2022 @ 12:25 am
Jenny Chu, I'd think you could probably pull that off with Spanish and Portuguese too.
Dara Connolly, going by Wiktionary it just seems to be from тут meaning 'here', probably ultimately from a PIE demonstrative. By contrast 'tuath' seems to be from *tewtéh₂, as is 'tauta'.
Stephen Hart said,
March 19, 2022 @ 12:12 pm
Philip Anderson said,
A good many non-British (or even British) Anglophones can’t understand a broad Glasgow accent.
See, for example, Hamish Macbeth, a Scottish mystery comedy-drama television series produced by BBC Scotland.
Whole sentences can be unintelligible to west US English speakers, even when replayed repeatedly, even though the actors presumably are trying not to be obscure.
Philip Taylor said,
March 19, 2022 @ 12:39 pm
I had not encountered the series before you mentioned it, Stephen, but now that you have I can see that I will have to watch it when I run out of episodes of House M.D.. But to my (Southern British) ear, I don't think that the actors are particularly "trying not to be obscure" — they are, to my mind at least, simply portraying, to the best of their individual abilities, the dialect typical of the west coast of Scotland.
Dara Connolly said,
March 19, 2022 @ 5:34 pm
@John Swindle, I think that's right – the "Teutonic" demonyms are probably from the same root.
@Terpomo, that's a pity! Thanks for taking the time to satisfy my curiosity on this point.
Misha Schutt said,
March 19, 2022 @ 8:11 pm
Tut for ‘here’ exists in Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian. It’s not the usual word in Russian, but certainly familiar to any Russian speaker. Тутейший ‘a denizen of here’ sounds cute or perhaps a stretch, but it made immediate sense to me as a scholar of Russian (not a native speaker).
I believe that the process of planned language differentiation includes several items, such as adoption of distinctive vocabulary items and grammatical tricks from regional dialects into the new national language, especially if they’re not familiar to speakers of nearby languages. I’m sure this was consciously done in the development of Norwegian Landsmål, and probably in Ukrainian as well.
In the late 1990s I chatted with a Croatian who had gone back to visit her hometown after the Yugoslav breakup. She said she was in the market and asked for bread, when everyone turned on her angrily and said, “That’s the Serbian word! We don’t say that any more!”
Jenny Chu said,
March 19, 2022 @ 8:28 pm
Terpomo – I am hoping to visit Portugal next year, so I will take your advice! I will just need to learn Spanish first.
Scott Mauldin said,
March 24, 2022 @ 2:55 am
@D.O. Isn't this true for most related and geographically contiguous languages – especially those that became nationally standardized in the 20th century?