Contours and consequences of lexical divide in Ukrainian

When compared with its two large neighbours, Russian and Polish, the Ukrainian language presents a picture of striking internal variation. Not only are Ukrainian dialects more mutually divergent than those of Polish or of territorially more widespread Russian, but on the literary level the language has long been characterized by the existence of two variants of the standard which have never been perfectly harmonized, in spite of the efforts of nationalist writers for a century and a half. While Ukraine’s modern standard language is based on the Eastern dialect of the Kyiv-Poltava-Kharkiv triangle, the literary Ukrainian cultivated by most of the diaspora communities continues to follow to a greater or lesser degree the norms of the Lviv koine in the form it had a acquired by 1944, the year that Galicia was definitively joined to the rest of Ukraine. Linguists divide the Ukrainian language into three main dialect groups : the Northern, the South-Eastern and the South-Western. The southerly, or Steppe dialect of the lower Dnieper basin, Donets’k and Crimea, is essentially a colonial variety of Ukrainian introduced into lands formerly occupied by Turkic-speaking peoples.