The history of the Ukrainian language goes back to medieval Ruthenian (the name “Ukrainian” came into use in the early 19th century to distinguish “Ruthenian” from “Russian”); its written use is documented in Kievan Rus’ in the 11th-12th centuries. Old Ruthenian (the ancestor language of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian) was the official clerical language of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, after the 1569 Union of Lublin, a co-official government language of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; in this context, Polish exercised an influence on Ruthenian, characteristics of which were noted in a “Slavonic grammar” (Hrammatika sloves’ka) published in Vilnius in 1596. It was followed in 1619 by Meletij Smotrycky’s “Slavonic grammar with correct syntax” (Hrammatiky Slavenskya pravylnoe Syntagma, Vilnius), which codified the language according to the speech patterns of that time. Pamwo Berynda, a prominent lexicographer and writer, published in 1627 in Kyiv the first dictionary of Slavonic names with translations into Ruthenian: Leksikon slavenorosskij al’bo Imen tolkovanije.
Ruthenian was widely used as a clerical language in the late-18th-century Hetmanat period, but Polish (popular among the Orthodox clergy at that time and an established governmental language west of the Dnieper) became dominant. A Polonization policy was further accelerated by the closure of Ukrainian schools by the Polish government in 1789.
The emergence of modern standardized Ukrainian began with Ivan Kotljarevs’kyj’s poetic pastiche of the Aeneid in the vernacular, Eneïda (St Petersburg, 1798). The first printed grammar of the Ukrainian common language was written in 1805 in St Petersburg by Oleksij Pavlovs’kyj (Hrammatyka malorossijskoho narechija, “Grammar of the Little-Ruthenian dialect”), which maintained that this Little Ruthenian dialect is a separate language. The Imperial Academy of Sciences rejected that thesis, and as a result the book remained unpublished until 1818.
Ukrainian (also known as “Little-Russian” or “Little-Ruthenian”) suffered a series of interdicts over the next decades. The most significant of these was the Valuev Circular (18 July 1863), issued by the Minister of Internal Affairs Pëtr Valuev; it declared that Ukrainian was not a separate language but a variant of Russian, and forbade all publications in Ukrainian (except belles-lettres and historical documents). This provision was sharpened in the Ems Ukaz of 1876, banning the printing of Ukrainian, the import of Ukrainian publications (from Habsburg Galicia) and the staging of plays in Ukrainian. In 1888, Aleksandr III banned the use of Ukrainian in government offices and the use of Ukrainian baptismal names.
A more tolerant situation was in effect across the border, in Habsburg-ruled Galicia (where the language was referred to as “Ruthenian”). Josef II had issued reforms which improved the social situation of the Ukrainian peasantry and lightened the religious oppression of the Greek Catholic Church; in 1787 at L’viv/Lemberg University a special department Studium rutenum had opened, functioning until 1809. Subjects were taught in an artificial Slavonic/Ruthenian hybrid. In 1848 the university opened a Department of Ruthenian Studies under Jakiv Holovats’kyj – member of the “Ruthenian Triad” (Rus’ka Trijcia) and editor of the almanac Rusalka Dnistrovaja (“The mermaid from the Dniester”). Ruthenian became an official administrative and school language, but the pressure of Polish in Galicia was noticeable.
In the 1830s the so-called “alphabet war” broke out over the choice between Cyrillic or Latin. In 1834 the linguist Josyp Łozynśkyj published, in Polish, O wprowadzeniu abecadła polskiego do piśmiennictwa ruskiego (“The introduction of the Polish alphabet into the Ruthenian language”), drawing criticism from the writer and linguist Josyp Lewyts’kyj (Відповідь на погляд про запровадження польської азбуки в руську писемність, Vidpovid’ na pogljad pro zaprovadžennja Pol’s’koi azbuky v Rus’ky pysemnist’, “The answer to the introduction of the Polish alphabet into the Ruthenian language”, 1834) and from Markijan Šaškevyč (Азбука і abecadło, “The Cyrillic and Polish alphabets”, 1836). In 1837 the Rusalka Dnistrovaja almanac (published in Buda in an orthography based on spoken Ruthenian and printed in the graždanka alphabet, a simplified Cyrillic typographically close to Latin) proclaimed Cyrillic to be the most suitable for the Ruthenian language in Galicia. The prominent Galician-Ruthenian writer Ivan Franko (1856–1913) would in his work also opt for Cyrillic.
The first Ruthenian grammar in Galicia was written in 1823 (published only in 1910) in Przemyśl by the Ukrainian Catholic priest Ivan Mogylnyts’kyj: Граматика язика словено-руського (Gramatyka jazyka Sloveno-Rus’kogo, “Grammar of the Sloveno-Ruthenian language”), which maintained the separateness of Ruthenian vis-à-vis Polish. Lewyts’kyj published a German-language Ruthenian grammar in Przemyśl in 1834, which asserted the unity of the Ukrainian language in the Russian Ukraine (Eastern Ukraine) and Ruthenian in Galicia (western Ukraine).
The increasing number of Ukrainian schools in Galicia stimulated demand for grammar books from 1845 on. In 1893 in L’viv a Руська граматика (Rus’ka gramatyka, “Ruthenian Grammar”) was published, whose authors, Stepan Smal-Stockyj and Theodor Gartner (both of whom had links to the Bukovina region), tried to approximate Ruthenian and Serbian. A German-language reissue (Grammatik der Ruthenischen (Ukrainischen) Sprache, Vienna 1913) was more accurate.
In eastern Ukraine new grammar books were published after a liberalization of the language-political climate, between 1906 and 1914. They were only used for self-education, since there were no Ukrainian schools in the Russian Empire. Only in the 1840-60 decades, had been Sunday schools opened as private initiatives for adult and juvenile literacy in Ukrainian. The Sunday schools used a primer, Грама́тка (Gramatka, 1857) by the prominent writer Pantelejmon Kuliš. Its phonetic orthography, known after the author as kulišivka, contributed significantly to the standardization of modern Ukrainian.
While the modern language began to emerge with Kotljarevs’kyj, modern Ukrainian literacy was the creation of Taras Ševčenko (1814–1861). All his poems are based on the speech of the common people of the Čerkassy district. The language of his Kobzar (St Petersburg 1840) became a standard for both East and West Ukrainian and for the current modern Ukrainian standard language.
