I talked to the Ukrainian instructor who is coming to us from Bakhmut. She’s a native speaker of Ukrainian, for all that people keep chirping stupidly that the Donbass is Russian-speaking. She speaks so fast, I had to do this thing where I go into a zone when somebody speaks a language to be able to follow.
A wonderful young woman who has never been on an airplane and has never even been to Kyiv, let alone overseas. What’s even better, she wants to be a literary critic.
I’m very psyched.
Clarissa's Blog 
“chirping stupidly that the Donbass is Russian-speaking”
Kind of like Crimea… I haven’t known many people from there but every single one I have met listed Ukrainian as a first language.
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To what extent do the common, day-to-day languages in and around Ukraine and Russia fall into separate categories vs. a dialect continuum?
I understand that standardized Ukrainian taught in schools is different from standardized Russian taught in schools. But I also understand that prior to standardization promulgated via schools and mass media, people in villages far from both Moscow and Kyiv were speaking dialects that might not fall perfectly into either category. I know that similar situations hold in, say, Portugal and Spain and France and Italy, where the local dialects don’t always match perfectly with the official languages of the capital cities, and might well resemble dialects spoken on the other side of the border.
In any case, I’m sure this woman is fluent in standard Ukrainian. I’m just curious how meaningful it is to distinguish the on-the-ground language of the Donbas from either Russian or Ukrainian.
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“how meaningful it is to distinguish the on-the-ground language of the Donbas ”
It’s meaningful because a few years ago putin made some declaration (mostly ignored) that the russian language was the ‘state forming’ element (I forget the exact wording) of russia.
In other words, he was claiming that any place where a significant portion of the people spoke russian should be under direct russian political control. People who paid attention didn’t want to believe that’s what he was saying, but…. that’s what he was saying (and is saying still).
A campaign against Ukrainian as a fake language invented by Jews or Poles or soviets or… somebody had been going on for a time as had the propaganda of russian being the natural language of everyone in ‘novorossija’ (which people also made excuses for and then conveniently forgot about).
Most westerners (especially those with a pro-russian bent) simply don’t want to believe all sorts of crazy things that are, unfortunately, true.
Many rightwingers don’t think putin is a globalist even though he has signs put up in russia that say things like ‘russia has no borders’ or ‘russian borders are limitless’….
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There are many people in the Donbass region who speak surzhik, the Russianized version of Ukrainian. How we know that it’s still Ukrainian and not Russian is that Russians don’t understand it and Ukrainians do.
Surzhik is not a dialect. It’s more of a low-education verbal register. There are a couple of dialects in Ukraine but they are all in the country’s West. These are the folks who live in the Carpathians. I don’t understand them at all if they don’t speak very slowly. Russian soldiers at the front keep confusing them with NATO soldiers because they are so different.
I don’t think there are dialects in Russian. There are big differences in pronunciation (like those between the Spanish of Argentina and that of Spain) but I never encountered anything rising to the level of a dialect.
These are all fascinating issues.
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Dear Clarissa, how do you get such wonderful people around you? It must be your intense psychic energy that attracts such gems. Molodets!
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My wonderful people are really wonderful. But my jerks are really atrocious. I don’t write about them much but they do exist.
I am a person of great extremes. 🙂
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