Linguae Europaeae

by Marshall Janevicius How can a national language be considered legitimate when the president of the nation does not believe in it? Alexander Lukashenko has been the authoritarian president of Belarus since 1994. Lukashenko has previously taken a stance that Belarusian is inferior to Russian, saying, “nothing significant can be expressed [in Belarusian].” Belarus, formerly Byelorussian SSR, gained its independence on August 25, 1991. Even though the Eastern European country has been independent for just over two decades, a near-century of soviet influence makes many Belarusians still feel like they are under direct Russian influence. Due to this, there is a stigma in Belarus that anything Belarusian is boring and that Russian is superior. How can a national language be considered legitimate when the president of the nation does not believe in it? Alexander Lukashenko has been the authoritarian president of Belarus since 1994. Lukashenko has previously taken a stance that Belarusian ...

by Lucy Pakhnyuk Many people probably wouldn’t be able to answer this question, and the people who have tried to answer it haven’t really come to a consensus. If you ask a Ukrainian this question, they’ll simply say that Rusyns are a sub-group of Ukrainians, and their language is nothing more than a Ukrainian dialect. But don’t call a Rusyn Ukrainian unless you’re looking for a fight. Rusyns consider themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, and they believe that their language is a distinct language, not a Ukrainian dialect. The question of Rusyn identity is fairly complicated, to say the least. Rusyns, also known as Ruthenians or Carpatho-Rusyns, are a Slavic ethnic group that lives mostly around the Carpathian Mountains. Their language, Rusyn or Ruthene, is an East Slavic language that’s closely related to Ukrainian and Russian and uses the Cyrillic script (although Rusyns in Slovakia use the Latin script). There are about 623,940 Rusyns in the world, 560,000 of which live in Uk...