ABSTRACT
The area known as Galicia (Halyčyna) 1 has always functioned as a bridge between Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe. From the perspective of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, it has been constantly regarded as the “most European” genuinely East Slavic region, primarily for two reasons: first, it was part of the Austrian Empire between 1772 and 1918 (Austro-Hungarian since 1867), and second, it was not incorporated into the Soviet Union until World War II. Moreover, Galicia is known as the traditional stronghold of a separate Ukrainian national consciousness and of widespread use of the Ukrainian language. Hence, Galicia and the Galicians, as well as the Galician variety of Ukrainian, have always served as favorite targets for anti-Ukrainian and anti-European attacks. The present study demonstrates that this remains unchanged today, despite the fact that virtually all anti-Galician stereotypical attitudes, especially those concerning language, are based on false or at least questionable assumptions. Some of these stereotypes are widespread and occur even beyond the types of sources presented below. First, despite certain local peculiarities, the Galician variety of the Ukrainian language, as it comes into play in the linguistic discussions of today, is not “a Galician dialect” by origin. In reality, its most important source is the literary language that developed in the Ukrainian-speaking territories of the Russian Empire and that was adopted in Galicia under the influence of the most notable Ukrainian writers of the nineteenth century, Taras Ševčenko and Pantelejmon Kuliš, beginning in the 1860s (Moser 2008, 2009). Second, it is true that Galician Ukrainian is characterized by various loan elements, but it is a fact that not only Modern Standard Ukrainian but also other languages, including Russian, feature a sizable number of various foreign elements at all linguistic levels as well. Third, some authors try to characterize recent efforts to introduce some changes into the orthography of Modern Standard Ukrainian as Galician by provenance. Yet even truly “Galician” orthographies, such as the “Želexivka” (the orthography designed by Jevhen Želexivs'kyj for his Ukrainian-German dictionary of 1886) included non-Galician models to a considerable extent. And the so-called Xarkiv orthography of 1928 and 1929 (cf. Vakulenko’s chapter in this volume), which many Ukrainians of the diaspora still adhere to and which indeed serves as an important point of reference within the recent discourse on the reform of Ukrainian orthography, was only the result of a quite reasonable Galician-non-Galician compromise, abandoned in 1933 at the peak of Stalinist terror in Ukraine. As a matter of fact, many peculiarities of the Galician variety of Ukrainian were best preserved in the Ukrainian diaspora, especially in North America, after Galicia was annexed by the Soviet Union. In Soviet Ukraine, Galician Ukrainian was persecuted and supplanted by a more Russianized Soviet variety of Ukrainian. Still, the Ukrainian language as such has remained more vital in Galicia than in any other area of Ukraine. Most likely, this is the reason why some contemporaries, especially those who still question the right of the Modern Standard Ukrainian Language to exist, have developed a particularly negative attitude toward Galicia and Galician Ukrainian.
