Ukrainian Is Not a Dialect: Hrinchenko's Dictionary

The myth of the “dialect”

The claim that Ukrainian is not a separate language but a “sub-dialect” or “corrupted” Russian served imperial policy for centuries (from bans on the language to assertions that no separate nation exists). The simplest answer to it is the fact of codification: the existence of a complete dictionary of the literary language, compiled on the basis of the people’s living speech.

”Slovar ukrainskoi movy”

That fact became the four-volume dictionary edited by Hrinchenko, published in Kyiv in 1907–1909 (about 68,000 words). Its material had been gathered over decades by the editorial office of the journal Kievskaya starina, while Hrinchenko — tellingly, not a professional philologist — compiled it at the peak of his activity, adding about 20,000 words he had collected himself and collaborating with linguists, notably Ahatanhel Krymsky^[1][2]. The work was painstaking: cards bearing words were debated — what was Ukrainian and what was not. Hrinchenko’s dictionary remains to this day a primary source that philologists consult^[2].

”Passport of the nation”

Stambol vividly calls the dictionary the “passport of the nation”. The logic is direct: a dictionary is a document that attests to the existence of a language, and language is the principal expression of a nation. If a codified language exists, so does the nation^[3]. This is precisely why the empire attacked the Ukrainian language so persistently: to undermine the language was to undermine the very existence of a separate people.

Codification as nation-building

It is worth recalling the context: at the time, the reality of the Ukrainian language was not obvious even to many Ukrainians themselves. People had to be persuaded that the entire public sphere could be Ukrainian-speaking — or even a family (the Hrinchenko family was a rare example of a fully Ukrainian-speaking one)^[4]. The pressure to assimilate was immense. That is why compiling the dictionary was not only a philological task but also a nation-building one — a recording of the fact that the language, and therefore the nation, were real.

The empire tried to ban it

The best proof that the language was real and dangerous to the empire is the stubbornness with which it was banned. The notorious Valuyev Circular of 1863 closed Ukrainian Sunday schools (including those funded by the patron Yelyzaveta Skoropadska-Myloradovych) and effectively prohibited Ukrainian-language printing^[5]. “Non-existent dialects” are not feared like this.

The ban was circumvented through Galicia, where, under Austria, persecution was milder. Skoropadska-Myloradovych donated 100,000 Austrian guldens and in 1863 founded in Lviv the Taras Shevchenko Printing House: it printed Ukrainian books and smuggled them across the entire Russian Empire. On this foundation the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh, 1892) later arose — an unofficial Ukrainian academy of sciences^[6]. The national movement, in the patron’s words, “knows no bounds”: a ban on one side of the border was offset by work on the other.

Two empires — two regimes for one language

The artificiality of the bans is seen most clearly when one compares how the same Ukrainian language was treated by the two empires between which the Ukrainian lands found themselves after the partitions of Poland — the Russian and the Austrian (from 1867, Austro-Hungarian). Up to the mid-nineteenth century, there was almost no purely linguistic persecution in Russian-ruled Ukraine — Ukrainian was simply regarded as a “dialect of Russian.” But in the second half of the nineteenth century outright bans began: the Valuyev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Ukaz of 1876 effectively prohibited book-printing in Ukrainian^[12][15].

On the other side of the border, the logic was the reverse. In Austria, Ukrainian (then called “Ruthenian,” “Rusyn”) was at first also underrated — regarded almost as a “dialect of Polish” — and developed slowly until the “Ruthenian Triad” (Markiyan Shashkevych, Ivan Vahylevych, Yakiv Holovatsky) set about creating a full literary language out of the “rustic” vernacular; their almanac Rusalka Dnistrovaya appeared in 1837. In the second half of the nineteenth century there was no particular suppression of the Ukrainian language in Austria-Hungary^[13]. This was no accident: the December Constitution of 1867 guaranteed in the Austrian part of the empire equality of citizens, freedom of speech, assembly, and religion — and remained in force until 1918. On this ground, Ukrainian institutions operated legally in Galicia: as early as after the revolution of 1848 the Supreme Ruthenian Council arose in Lviv, and under its influence the Ukrainian-language newspaper “Zorya Halytska”^[16]. Censorship, of course, existed, but its limit was fundamentally different: “the main thing is that you do not speak out against the emperor — and beyond that, write essentially whatever you like”^[17].

The difference showed even in the social order. Serfdom existed in both empires, but in Russia it was “closer to slavery” — the historian compares it to the condition of Black slaves in America — whereas in Austria peasants had more rights, and serfdom itself was abolished after the revolution of 1848^[14]. That is, the matter was not a “corrupted dialect”: the very same language that one empire banned by decree was, on the other side of the border, calmly codified and developed in the press and in institutions. The ban was a political decision of St. Petersburg, not a property of the language.

A language is not “invented” — it develops

The very way the question is posed (“when and who invented the Ukrainian language”) betrays a misunderstanding of how language works at all. In Vitaliy Dribnytsia’s street interview, the interlocutor puts it succinctly: “Языки не изобретают, язык развивается — это живое явление, оно меняется в веках” (“Languages are not invented; a language develops — it is a living phenomenon, it changes over the centuries”)^[7]. This is a basic thesis of linguistics from the school curriculum: a language develops on its own, the same way among all peoples, so the notion that “the Ukrainians had a language invented for them” contradicts the very foundations of the discipline^[8].

Proof of the language’s maturity is the date of the first work of literature. The first work in the new Ukrainian literary language is Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s “Eneyida” (Aeneid) (1798); before it there already existed dictionaries of the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, and later Hrinchenko’s four-volume dictionary. The appearance of a full-fledged work at the end of the eighteenth century means that the language was already formed by then, not “invented” later^[9].

The claim of a “dialect” also fails to withstand scrutiny: by the classification of languages, Ukrainian belongs to the Indo-European family and, within it, to the East Slavic group alongside Belarusian and Russian. These are three languages of equal standing within one group, not “a language and its sub-dialect”^[10]. The chronological argument is telling too: modern literary Russian is the language of Pushkin (not the earlier Lomonosov), and Pushkin was born at about the time the “Eneyida” was already in print. That is, the Ukrainian literary language arose no later than modern Russian^[11].

What this means

“Dialects” are not the subject of four-volume academic dictionaries that linguists consult a century later. Hrinchenko’s dictionary is a material refutation of the myth: the Ukrainian language was codified as a full-fledged literary language as early as the start of the twentieth century. And together with the language, what the empire tried to erase was also documented — a separate nation.