On the dialectal basis of the Ruthenian literary language

Ukrainianists and Belarusianists traditionally assumed that “Ukrainian” and “Belarusian” authors of the middle period of the East Slavic language history wrote essentially in their own respective mother tongues or even native dialects; linguistic features belonging to dialects of the other of the two modern nations were regarded as “foreign” influences due to the close political and cultural ties between “Ukrainians” and “Belarusians”. Nowadays more and more scholars come to acknowledge the existence at that time of a common Ruthenian literary standard. However, the relationship between this standard variety and the diversity of the Ruthenian dialects is still rather unclear. As the Ruthenian questione della lingua, i.e. the problem of choosing a dialect basis for the standard variety, was never discussed explicitly (mainly because of the overwhelming importance of Polish and Church Slavonic in the Ruthenian metalinguistic discourse), the role of intermediate dialects (e.g. Polissian), dialect mixing (e.g. Vilna and Galicia), the acceptability of individual dialect features, and linguistic conservatism (e.g. in orthography) for the standardization of Ruthenian remain to be thoroughly evaluated. This is what this paper tries to do