Ruthenian language
| Ruthenian (руськъ) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Eastern Europe |
| Region: | -- |
| Total speakers: | Extinct |
| Ranking: | -- |
| Genetic classification: |
Indo-European Slavic East Slavic Ruthenian |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | historical: Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth |
| Regulated by: | -- |
Ruthenian was a historic East Slavic language, spoken in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and after 1569 in the East Slavic territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Having evolved from Old East Slavic language, Ruthenian was the ancestor of modern Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn languages.
Divergence between Ruthenian and Russian
As Eastern Europe gradually freed itself from the Tatar yoke in the later part of the 14th century, there were four princes that adopted the title of Grand Duke. Two of them claimed the legacy of Kievan Rus' and started to "recollect" the East Slavic territories: one in Moscow and one in Vilnius. These activities resulted in two separate mainly East Slavic states, the Grand Duchy of Moscow (Russian Великое Княжество Московское), which eventually evolved into the Russian Empire, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Belarusian Вялікае Княства Літоўскае), which covered roughly the territories of modern Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania and later united with Roman Catholic Poland to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Linguistically, both states continued to use the literary language of Kievan Rus', but due to the immense Polish influence in the west and to the Church Slavonic influence in the east, they gradually developed into two distinct literary languages: Ruthenian in Lithuania and the Commonwealth, and (Old) Russian in Muscovy.
Both languages were usually called рускій 'Rusian' or словенскій 'Slavonic'; only when a differentiation between the language of Muscovy and the one of Lithuania was needed was the former called московскій 'Moscovian' (and, rarely, the latter литвинскій 'Lithuanian').
This linguistic divergence is confirmed by the need for translators during the mid-seventeenth-century negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav, between Bohdan Khmelnytsky, (Bogdan Chmielnicki), ruler of Rus'-Ukraine and the state of Moscow (Russia).
Continuing Polish influence
Since the Union of Lublin in 1569, the southern territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (roughly modern Ukraine) came under direct administration by the Polish Crown, whereas the north (roughly Belarus and Lithuania) retained some autonomy. This resulted also in differences concerning the status of Ruthenian as an official language and the intensity of Polish influence on Ruthenian. However, in both parts of Commonwealth inhabited by Eastern Slavs Ruthenian remained a lingua franca, and in both parts it was more and more replaced by Polish as a language of literature, religious polemic, and official documents.
Some scholars take this gradually developping differences as a reason to speak of separate Ukrainian and Belarusian languages as early as about 1600. However, it is really dialect differences that show up in some texts, whereas other texts cannot be localized with certainty, leading to disputes about whether a given text is written in "Old Ukrainian" or in "Old Belarusian". Moreover, in contrast to the Ruthenian-Moscovian differences, "Belarusians" and "Ukrainians" needed no interpreters to understand each other. For instance, Smotrytsky's grammar of Church Slavonic had to be modified to be published in Moscow, but could be used without any modifications in all the Ruthenian lands.
However, during the 18th century there were less and less texts written in Ruthenian, which was replaced by Polish in the Commonwealth and by Russian in the territories conquered by the Russian Empire.
Further differentiation
With the beginning of romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, Belarusian and Ukrainian appeared as two new East Slavic literary languages, descendent from the popular dialects and little-influenced by literary Ruthenian. Meanwhile, Russian language retained a layer of Church Slavonic "high vocabulary", leaving the other two East Slavic languages appear one-dimensional in comparison.
Thus, by 1800, the Ruthenian language had evolved into three modern languages. For their further development, see Belarusian language, Rusyn language, and Ukrainian language.
The name Ruthenian language has also sometimes been applied to: