Maintaining the Standard Ukrainian Language : A Challenge for Teachers in Australia

The paper deals with problems of preservation of the Ukrainian language in Australia, based on the 25-year experience of one of the authors, in teaching Ukrainian studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. Against a background of growing assimilation and the dying away of Multiculturalism as a government policy, the authors examine the structure and history of the Ukrainian community in order to explain the characteristics of dialect-influenced spoken Ukrainian, and set up categories for the other main phenomena of linguistic interference in the areas of phonology and morphosyntax. As a parallel concern, they consider a problem with special relevance in the Ukrainian homeland today, at a time when the direction of language planning is an important issue: the gap between modern standard Ukrainian and the different varieties of Ukrainian found in the diaspora.


Ukrainian in Post-Multicultural Australia
The preservation of the Ukrainian language in Australia and other countries of the diaspora is unfortunately a little-researched subject.In general, questions of linguistic ecology and multiculturalism, while of increasing concern to Australian scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, have ceased to be of great interest to them in this century because of a widespread feeling within the English-speaking population that certain ethnic groups who had recently settled in Australia had not fully accepted this country's values.These groups have been growing in numbers at a rapid pace, their cultures stand in sharp and conspicuous contrast to that of ordinary Australians, and they show little or no inclination to assimilate to the majority of the population.As a result the multicultural era can be considered to be over, and with it the preparedness of the government to support and finance strongly the means of preserving ethnic languages.Among the victims of this change in attitude have been ethnic schools, radio programs and even grants for research in this area.
Meanwhile assimilation has taken its toll on the 37,500-strong Ukrainian population of Australia.(Note 1) In community schools, secondary schools and institutes of higher learning the number of students who enroll in Ukrainian-specific subjects has significantly fallen in the past 15 years.At the same time the number of migrants from Ukraine has increased by seven and a half thousand.Of these, a small percentage has joined the local Ukrainian community.However, when these new arrivals encounter local Ukrainian youth at scout camps for young people organized by the Plast and SUM movements or at social functions or the Ukrainian Saturday schools, they notice differences in the way Ukrainian Australians speak the Ukrainian language, even to the extent that members of the two groups can have considerable difficulty understanding each other.Before we look at the kind of language used by Ukrainians in Australia, it will be useful to present a brief historical overview of Ukrainian settlement in this country, and especially the provenance of the people who arrived here in 1948 and 1949, because it was their varieties of Ukrainian that set the linguistic habits of the following generations.

Origins of the Australian Ukrainian Community
Professor Eugene Seneta, in the English-language paper "Ukrainians in the 1986 Census", which he delivered in Sydney in 1988 at the fourth conference on the History of Ukrainian Settlement in Australia, observed that "the proportion of Orthodox in the Catholic-Orthodox group is 40.5%"(Seneta, 1988;82).In that year, when Australia was celebrating its bicentenary, Professor Lubomyr Lawriwsky wrote the following about the Ukrainian community in his article for the monumental work The Australian People: "In contrast to the situation in Ukraine, about two-thirds of the Ukrainian migrants [to Australia] were Catholics.It had been easier for them to escape to the West because they were geographically closer in Western Ukraine, and it was harder to repatriate them forcibly after the war [to the expanded Soviet Ukraine] because they had been pre-war citizens of Poland" (Lawriwsky, 1988;826).The general figure for Australian residents of Ukrainian origin (i.e. from both pre-war Soviet Ukraine and pre-war Eastern Poland) was 32,000 according to Seneta's detailed calculations based on census responses.By contrast, over the past 20 years when greater numbers of people from the Soviet Union migrated to Australia, the proportion of Orthodox has slowly increased.According to the 2006 census, about 45.5% per cent of that section of the Australian population who designated their religion as 'Ukrainian Christian' declared themselves Orthodox, and the remainder, predominantly from the single region of Galicia, identified themselves as Ukrainian Catholics.(Note 2) Given the important fact that migrants from formerly Polish Volhynia and Western Polissia are generally Orthodox, not Catholic, in faith, one can therefore conclude that the larger half of the Ukrainian population of Australia is solidly Western Ukrainian in origin.This is obviously mirrored in the speech habits of these people and their children.

The linguistic character of the Ukrainian Diaspora community
We mention this proportion because the regional differences in the language of the young (and not so young) Australian Ukrainians who have enrolled in Ukrainian courses at Macquarie University over the past 25 years strongly reflected their parents' places of origin as well as their level of Ukrainian and their English education.It often happens that a highly educated person with a good profession comes from a family in which standard Ukrainian is not spoken, but rather a regional variety.It is easy to imagine the feelings of such individuals when they are called upon to express their thoughts at meetings of the Ukrainian community.Fear of appearing foolish increasingly inhibits their speaking of Ukrainian in public and drives them to express themselves in English instead.
From the sociolinguistic and cultural standpoints this inferiority complex on the part of dialect speakers is unfortunate, because all regional varieties of a language are valid and valuable systems of communication, and standard varieties are, after all, arbitrary conventions.In European countries like Germany and Italy there is a strong tradition of cherishing dialects, many which indeed have their own literatures, sometimes boasting distinguished poets and writers, and this is seen to enrich rather than detract from the national cultural heritage.Ukraine, by contrast, suffers from a degree of linguistic insecurity, given the great effort made to create a literary standard and to assert its right to exist.In such a situation dialects are easily undervalued and stigmatized, though one hopes that as standard Ukrainian gains greater stability, linguistic confidence of an inclusive kind will increase, and due respect for regional varieties of the language will be restored.
At the 1998 conference, Archpriest Ivan Szewciw remarked that the first Ukrainian settlers in Australia "were common people, formerly members of the peasantry and even then from the poorest socio-economic bracket, with a small percentage of members of the intelligentsia (that is, people with a university education: 1-2%) or petit bourgeois, small business owners and traders from our villages and little towns who, during the war, had willingly or unwillingly found themselves in Germany for compulsory labour or who had fled before the Bolshevik advance after the retreat of the German army from Ukraine" (Szewciw, 1990;72).According to Fr Szewciw the membership of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Australia in 1988 was estimated to be about 23,000.While this figure for Catholics is much higher than the one given in the 1986 census, it is based on the number of faithful registered in Ukrainian Catholic parishes in Australia.This extra data is worth taking into account in order to get a clearer view of the provenance and regional characteristics of the language spoken by the second and third generations.

Teaching Ukrainian in the Diaspora
In spite of the preponderance of people from Western Ukraine, Ukrainian schools and language publications in Australia have adhered to the standard literary language which had been brought from Europe and have avoided dialectal forms.Hence the challenge for teachers has always been not only to teach standard Ukrainian to the young but also to correct the regionalisms in the speech of those who have grown up hearing and using a regional variant.It suffices to read an English-language article by Dr Olga Dudinski, entitled "Ukrainian Schools in Victoria: Perspectives, Needs and Planning" to see that the struggle to preserve the hereditary language, in the face of the everyday and official pressures of English, is a longstanding phenomenon (Dudinski, 1988;24).The Ukrainian school system was established in the 1950s, not long after the arrival in Australia of the most numerous wave of Ukrainian immigrants.However, she reports on a student survey conducted between 1987 and 1988, which revealed that although they viewed the maintenance of their identity as an important or very important task, the majority of young Ukrainian Australians were using English in their relations with their parents, siblings and Ukrainian friends.Only with their grandparents did they speak their hereditary language, of course for the reason that the older generation had a poor command of English.The situation has obviously worsened since these students have grown up and become parents themselves.An analogous situation exists in the other Ukrainian diasporas, although the number of migrants in Canada and the United States is evidently greater.

Dialect as a pedagogical challenge
Scholars have for a long time been researching the regional differences within the Ukrainian language.One of the most significant products of this discipline is surely the three-volume Atlas of the Ukrainian Language edited by I. H. Matvijas (1984Matvijas ( -1992)).This work follows the generally-accepted division of Ukrainian into three principal groups of dialects: the northern, the south-eastern and the south-western, all subdivided further into numerous local subdialects.The group most relevant to our interest is the south-western, because a majority of Australian Ukrainians are from Galicia, Volhynia and Bukovina, and because the south-western dialects also happen to be those that diverge most from the standard language.The speech of immigrants from the eastern and northern regions is distinctive but, apart from Russian influence, typically diverges far less from Standard Ukrainian (based as this is on a south-eastern dialect) than do the dialects of the south-west, which were additionally influenced by Polish and (in Bukovina) by Romanian in the period when migration to Australia began.
It is worth mentioning that the questions and problems relating to the preservation of ethnic languages are now being analysed within the framework of a research project at the Language and Society Centre at Monash University.Researchers have been monitoring the loss of the family languages over three generations of the Italian migrant community in the locality of Myrtleford, in the Victorian High Country north-east of Melbourne.The aim of the researchers is to make a quantitative and qualitative comparison between the Italian community and other ethnic groups who live outside the big cities.For this project they will use data from the last census in order to draw a map illustrating the multilingualism that exists in the small towns of Victoria.(Note 3) It has long been the genius of Ukrainian to bow at times-even for long periods-to these influences without sacrificing the essence of its distinct identity.During the long period of Soviet domination of the country the pendulum swung in the direction of Russian.Perhaps in the interest of restoring what is in essence a delicate balance, the time has come for the pendulum to swing westwards again.If this were to happen in the context of a carefully planned strategy of language planners, the Galician literary language which still flourishes in the diaspora could provide domestic Ukrainian with a template of Western European and international vocabulary transmitted through Polish, as an antidote to the recent overdose of Russian influence.In this sense the contribution of diaspora Ukrainianists and writers can be useful, providing new perspectives and concrete models for a language justly determined to assert itself in a new climate of freedom.