One thousand years of Ukrainian language history in Galicia

The relevance of the START project Y271-G20 "1,000 Years of Ukrainian Language History in Galicia" (led by Prof. Dr. Michael Moser) became obvious in the most tragic way in 2014, when the Russian Federation under President Vladimir Putin justified its military aggression against Ukraine with propagandistically distorted arguments from the arsenal of identity and language politics. In this project, the team investigated the history of the Ukrainian language with a special focus on the region called Galicia (Galicia proper, i.e., Eastern Galicia). We were interested in the interplay of the histories of languages and identities and in the role played by the contacts between Ukrainian speakers from different regions as well as in their contacts with neighboring languages. Galicia's significance for the history of the Ukrainian language has undoubtedly been great, which is also reflected in contemporary political discourses. Not without reason (all statistics confirm this obvious fact), Galicia has traditionally been regarded as the region in which the Ukrainian language is most vital. In our project, we aimed to explain the reasons for this development, which is much more complicated than one might think on the basis of traditional Ukrainian language historiography. In our project, we have not investigated the medieval history of the Ukrainian language very intensely, but were more interested in the question how traditional language historiography depicts and interprets the Middle Ages. In a forthcoming article Moser demonstrates that the Slavic varieties of the contemporary Ukrainian language area were usually labeled as "Slavic," not "Ruthenian" or "Rus'ian" [sic, derived from Rus], let alone "Russian." Much greater emphasis has been put on the early modern period. The major reason was that beginning in the 16th century, group identities and language formations that partially anticipated modern national identities and languages began increasingly taking shape. E.g., Moser wrote an article in which he demonstrated how the linguistic closeness of the early modern Ruthenian "literary" language can be described statistically. In another contribution, he suggested a new approach to the phenomenon of variation within that language. Along with that, Moser has offered new evidence for the importance of Galicia for the formation of the early modern Ruthenian "literary" language regarding both the internal norms and their dispersion (the latter can be explained, inter alia, by the migration of central figures of the Galician intellectual elites to Kyjiv etc. The focus was on the history of the Ukrainian language since the 19th century. In accordance with the outline, all team members have worked on the more modern period. Philipp Hofeneder wrote a dissertation on the hitherto ill-studied Galician Ruthenian school books from the second half of the 19th century. After his participation in the project he published a monograph on Soviet Ukrainian that partially results from his work within the START team. Marina Höfinghoff has published several remarkable studies on the elaboration of Galician terminologies. She is still working on her habilitation thesis. Katarzyna Hibel's most important contribution is her monograph devoted to the Ukrainian-Polish encounter in the interwar period that was published in early 2014. Kathleen Beger completed an excellent M.A. thesis on Galician school books of the interwar period that appeared in early 2014 as well. Michael Moser has published several books (on a hitherto unknown key "mini period" in the history of the Ukrainian language in Galicia, on Galician-"Great Ukrainian" interrelations, on contempary Ukrainian language policy, on Taras Shevchenko's language) as well as a number of articles. Another monograph devoted to the expansion of Galician norms to interwar "Subcarpathian Rus'" (Transcarpathia) has almost been completed. Moser's collection of essays titled "Prychynky do istoriji ukrains'koji movy" (800 S.) is the first book in the sphere of Ukrainian linguistics that has been published in three editions. A collection of new articles (ca. 600 pp.), is forthcoming in the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. These studies demonstrate that despite several disruptions the history of the Ukrainian language is characterized by a certain amount of continuity; that it varies according to regional boundaries but is coherent and sound. In our project we have tried to provide evidence that the history of languages-particularly the modern history of languages-can be interpreted as a result of active language management. Historically conditioned arbitrariness is essential for the delineation of languages, as well as for the delineation of ethnicities and nations (nationalities). Nations are in fact "imagined communities." Languages have been "imagined" and "invented" for these "imagined communities" based on dialects. This is true for Ukrainian as for neighboring or other languages. We have attempted to develop a fresh view of the history of the Ukrainian language that relies on a critical re-reading of a variety of sources and on an interdisciplinary approach (we have above all collaborated with historians). We have also repeatedly suggested our criticism of contemporary language historiography. Our work has been positively received by the international scholarly community. Our work has been met with great interest. In the fall of 2013, Moser was unanimously elected President of the International Association of Ukrainianists.