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].

Shevchenko and the label “South Russian”

The language of an author’s individual works does not determine a language’s status. The main body of Taras Shevchenko’s prose — nine novellas, a diary, and an autobiography — was written in Russian, while his poetic canon emerged in Ukrainian. Likewise, the label “South Russian language” is not linguistic proof of a “dialect”: it came from the imperial model of a “triune Russian people” and reflects the empire’s own political classification^[24].

An interpreter with the 1654 embassy

Diplomatic records also show distinct language practices. The Ukrainian embassy sent to Moscow after the Pereiaslav council of 1654 was accompanied by Yakiv Ivanovych, an army interpreter. The hetman’s letter and draft treaty were written in the Ukrainian chancery language, while their translations survive in Muscovite archives^[25]. This documents a need for language mediation at the official level, although it does not by itself prove complete mutual unintelligibility in everyday speech.

Who influenced whom: Kyivan book learning and Nikon’s reform

The “dialect” myth silently assumes that influence always ran one way — from the “great” Russian to the “Little Russian dialect.” The history of book culture shows the opposite. In a street dialogue, Dribnytsya recalls that in the 17th century the Muscovite bookish language itself was markedly influenced by the Kyivan one^[26]. Here one must be precise, because the transcript of the conversation is distorted: the point is not that “Russian borrowed the Ukrainian vernacular,” but a more specific and well-documented episode — the church reform of Patriarch Nikon (1650s) and its associated “book correction” (the editing of Muscovite liturgical books).

Already under Patriarch Joseph, in 1649, Kyivan (Mohyla) book learners led by Epiphanius Slavynetsky — graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium who knew Greek — were invited to Moscow. The corrections to Muscovite books were checked against Greek editions, and south-western Rus (Kyivan, Ostroh, Striatyn) printings often served as the intermediary. Along with the learned men from Kyiv, the Kyivan recension of Church Slavonic entered Muscovite book culture — the grammars (of Meletius Smotrytsky), the lexicons, and the educational practices of the Mohyla school. In other words, the direction of influence in the 17th century ran rather from Kyiv to Moscow, not the other way around. This is, of course, influence on the bookish, Church Slavonic register, not a direct “descent” of Russian from Ukrainian — yet even that is enough to overturn the “older Russian, younger dialect” scheme: at a pivotal moment for Muscovite book culture, it was Kyivan learning that served as the model.

Ukrainian features — already on the walls of St. Sophia

And how far back does the language itself go? Dissecting ten “awkward questions” posed by a pro-Russian blogger, the historian Vitaliy Dribnytsia cites evidence older than any dictionary. Birchbark letters are valuable precisely because they record not the bookish written standard but the living dialects people actually wrote and spoke — and already in the times of Kyivan Rus’ they show words Ukrainian in character (while, say, the Novgorod letters are lexically closer to the West Slavs)^[18]. The walls of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv preserve graffiti with the vocative case, which Russian lacks: “Bozhe, pomozy rabu tvoyemu… Danylu” (“O God, help Thy servant… Danylo”)^[19]. And in inscriptions that, according to the historian, were most likely left by Volodymyr Monomakh, the prince’s name is written not “Vladimir” but with the full-vowel form — “Volodymyr”^[20]. The point is not that eleventh-century Kyiv spoke modern Ukrainian — language is “a living phenomenon” and has changed since — but that the features that today distinguish Ukrainian from Russian are documented eight centuries before the Valuyev Circular.

The empire refuted the myth itself

Most tellingly, the arguments against the “dialect” were supplied by the imperial institutions themselves. Dribnytsia points to the logic of the bans: as long as St. Petersburg sincerely considered Ukrainian a “dialect,” it was not banned — in the first half of the nineteenth century, “by all means, go ahead and publish.” The repression began precisely when political ideas emerged along with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius — that is, when the empire saw behind the “Little Russian dialect” a real language of a real community^[21]. The non-existent is not banned: the Valuyev Circular itself is an involuntary admission that the language existed.

By the early twentieth century, imperial scholarship conceded as well: the memorandum of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, “On Abolishing the Restrictions on the Little Russian Printed Word” (1905), prepared by a commission chaired by Fyodor Korsh with Alexei Shakhmatov’s participation, stated that the “Little Russian dialect” is a separate language, in which the population has the right to speak publicly and to print^[22]. The final touch is Putin’s article on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (2021): even there the author writes “I am not going to idealize anything” and himself lists the Valuyev Circular of 1863 and the Ems “Act” of 1876, which restricted the publication of literature in Ukrainian — merely excusing them by the “historical context” of the events in Poland. In other words, even the myth’s chief promoter documents the bans — and only something that exists can be banned^[23].

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.