Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Rusyn language“

The Rusyn Language in Hungary After 1989
 The paper discusses the current situation of the language of Rusyns in Hungary. There are evidences of progressive disappearance of Rusyn dialects in villages of Komloska (Комловшка) and Mucsony (Мучонь); of language assimilation of the younger inhabitants of these places in North-Eastern Hungary in recent decades. The author also describes endeavors of Rusyns’ central and local, state subsidized self-government bodies to stop language assimilation and bring lessons of the Rusyn language to local schools in the two villages, as well as attempts of politicians and linguists to codify their variant of the literary Rusyn language (as Rusyns from the former Yugoslavia, Slovakia, and Poland did).

The Polycentric Standardization of the Rusyn Language
 Pursuant to the conclusions of the First Rusyn Language Congress held in Bardejovske Kupele (Slovakia) in 1992 Rusyn language planners are advised to follow the so-called Romansh model of the construction of a literary language (the Romansh language is spoken in five standardized idioms in South-Eastern Switzerland). This implies that each country inhabited by Rusyns should codify its own variant of the literary language based on the live local Rusyn language. Thus there emerge four variants of the Rusyn language: the Bačka-Srem variant (in Serbia and Croatia), the Prešov variant (in Slovakia), the Lemko variant (in Poland), and the Trans-Carpathian variant (in Ukraine; used in Romania and Hungary as well). The paper brings attention to the status and perspectives of the four variants of the Rusyn language. The Rusyn language codification process may be viewed as polycentric standardization.

Right at the start, one word in the title of this special topic issue requires clarification: the word “minority.” We will not try to define the term here, but it is only fair to say that some of the groups which are mentioned or discussed are not recognized as minorities or have a rather dubious legal position, as, for example, the Kashubs and Lemkos in Poland or Macedonians in Greece. As to the notion of linguistic minority: it is a term very often used but rarely defined. That it is often used has to do with the fact that most minorities in Europe speak a language or a dialect or variant which discriminates them from the majority. As a matter of fact, the nationalist traditions in Europe seem to take more or less for granted that a minority without a separate language is not a real minority. Language questions have been in the forefront of most nation-building projects or ethnic mobilizations in Europe, and so it has become more or less axiomatic that every nation or ethnic group should have its own language. As an example, the Bosnian language may be cited. The Bosnians—or rather the Bosniaks—insist on naming the language they use Bosnian instead of, as before, Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. They also insist on their right to standardize their language in their own fashion. Another good example is the Rusyn language, or rather—to be more precise—the Rusyn languages in the Carpathian area. As Rusyns, not Ukrainians, they are now trying to create their own standard language or languages on the basis of their own dialects. The Rusyns in Yugoslavia started this process earlier; consequently, the Rusyn language of Yugoslavia is now to be considered one of the standard Slavic languages.

P. R. Magocsi is the author of new phrasebooks of three variants of the Rusyn language: Transcarpathian Rusyn, Lemko Rusyn and Slovak Rusyn. The books are intended for English-speaking users, the main topics for everyday communication as well as small dictionary and grammatical information are provided.

The acquisition of statehood by the Eastern Slavic peoples - Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians -actualized the issue of self-determination of another related community - Rusyns, who originally lived in Transcarpathia and on the territory of other countries. In the modern Ukrainian state, Rusyns are not classified as a separate (indigenous) people or national minority, they are regarded as part of the Ukrainian ethnos and are under the threat of targeted assimilation. The article aims to substantiate the right of the Rusyn people to be recognized as an ethnic minority, to search for an optimal model of its self-identification, and to determine its equal position in the family of Eastern Slavs, taking into account the political and legal reality. For a comprehensive characterization of the object of research, the authors analyze scientific and normative sources that reveal the historical and political prerequisites for the formation of the Rusyn people's ethnic identity, caused by its isolated and long-term presence in the environment of a foreign-speaking and other-confessional population. Based on general scientific, specific scientific and special research methods, in particular, on the fact of an established original culture, a stable way of life, a well-developed literary Rusyn language, maintained permanent cross-border relationships between communities of foreign countries, the authors infer that there is a sociocultural reality - the Rusyn people. This conclusion is confirmed by examples from foreign legislation that classify Rusyns as an ethnic minority different from Ukrainians and allow the official use of the Rusyn language in places of Rusyns' compact settlement at the level of local communities in several European countries. In addition, attention is focused on international documents on human rights, which reflect the approach that national self-identification is realized as a result of an ethos's own sociopolitical choice rather than on the basis of ideological or other expediency in relation to an ethnos from the outside. Recognition of Rusyns as a national minority in Ukraine is seen in the introduction of this item on the agenda of international relations, including the convening of an international conference on this topic. Self-determination of the Rusyn people can be carried out in the form of intrastate autonomy, by analogy with what happened earlier in Article 81 of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 by decision of the leading powers of the world. Here, according to the authors, the main role belongs to Russia, since apart from it there are no other influential actors in world politics capable of ensuring the rights of the kindred Rusyn people through the involvement of international human rights mechanisms and other opportunities.

Contemporary Rusyn Literature in Slovakia after 1989
 The turbulent history of European nations in the 20th century culminates in 1989, the year of the Velvet Revolution, which has resulted in many positive changes for big as well as for small nations on the continent. In the history of Rusyn literature this period is called the Literature of the Third National Revival as it sees a significant increase in the number of writers, literary works and various publishing activities. The first part of the paper presents the socio-cultural situation of Rusyns in this period and possibilities of publishing literary texts in their language. The second part contains thematic and genre characteristics of the Rusyn literature in Slovakia after 1989. The last part is an interpretation of a poetry collection by Daniela Kapraľová which belongs to the most interesting works in the contemporary Rusyn literature in Slovakia.

The review is dedicated to the recent monograph by the Slovak historian Peter Švorc on Jurij Lažo (1867–1929). The book is a meticulously researched biography of the Rusyn national political activist set against the background of the history of the Carpathian Rusyns, Austria-Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The author pays increased attention to the issues of national and confessional identity of the Rusyn population of the Prešov region and Subcarpathian Rus’. J. Lažo went down in history primarily as a Senator who represented the interests of Rusyn villagers in the Czechoslovak Parliament, and as a fi ghter for the conversion of Greek Catholics to the Orthodox Church. Leger acted as a consistent proponent of the “all-Russian” (all-Eastern Slavic) national-language trend and a critic of the Magyarization and later Slovakization of the Rusyns. All six chapters of the monograph differ in their originality, and are based on documents from various archives in the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic, and Austria. Despite the remain- ing gaps in the biography of Jurij Lažo, Peter Švorc’s book is a valuable contribution to the historiography of this topic.

The paper presents a very different view of the Rusyn question in inter-war Czechoslovakia through the eyes of Rusyn representatives from across the spectrum of political parties in the Czechoslovak parliament. Although Subcarpathian Rus and its inhabitants were often idealised in Czechoslovakia for their unspoilt nature and patriarchal character, and Czechoslovak public opinion was very favourable towards the region, some Rusyn politicians certainly did not share this ideal. The Communist deputies in particular criticised all government policies and the persistence of general backwardness, but the question of the region’s autonomy was probably the most prominent among the Czechoslovak deputies representing Subcarpathian Rus. The paper highlights four main issues that emerged most frequently in the parliamentary debates: the quest for autonomy, the solution to the poor economic situation, the situation in education and disputes over the use of the language, and the dual treatment of Rusyns living in Slovakia and in Subcarpathian Rus.

AbstractThe paper presents experiments on part-of-speech and full morphological tagging of the Slavic minority language Rusyn. The proposed approach relies on transfer learning and uses only annotated resources from related Slavic languages, namely Russian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Polish, and Czech. It does not require any annotated Rusyn training data, nor parallel data or bilingual dictionaries involving Rusyn. Compared to earlier work, we improve tagging performance by using a neural network tagger and larger training data from the neighboring Slavic languages. We experiment with various data preprocessing and sampling strategies and evaluate the impact of multitask learning strategies and of pretrained word embeddings. Overall, while genre discrepancies between training and test data have a negative impact, we improve full morphological tagging by 9% absolute micro-averaged F1 as compared to previous research.

As you know, discussions about one’s own identity and literary language do not stop in the Carpatho–Rusyn society – first of all, between Rusynophiles and Ukrainophiles. At the same time, until the beginning of the twentieth century, there were practically no supporters of the Ukrainian national idea among the Carpatho-Rusyns. Russophiles played a significant role. The influential politician Adolf Dobryansky (1817–1901) and the Greek Catholic priest, the talented writer Yuliy Stavrovsky (1850–1899) belong to the pantheon of Carpatho-Rusyn “awakeners” (enlighteners) of 20th century, who considered all the Rusyns of the Habsburg monarchy to be part of a single Russian (East Slavic, not Great Russian or “Rus’-Ukrainian”) people. Published letters stored in the Scientific Research Department of Manuscripts of the Russian State Library (Moscow), date back to 1879, when the issue of appointing Stavrovsky dean of the church in the village Chertezh – estate of Dobryansky was being decided.