Iazychiie

Iazychiie — a derogatory term to describe the literary language used among Carpatho-Rusyns at various times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This language evolved from the literary, or book, language used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries known as Slaveno-Rusyn, which was basically *Church Slavonic mixed with local Rusyn vernacular. In the second half of the nineteenth century, during the national awakening, Rusyn writers for the most part replaced Church Slavonic with Russian vocabulary while retaining varying degrees of local vernacular. The language was never codified and the balance among Russian, Rusyn, and Church Slavonic elements varied from author to author. Its defenders described it as the “traditional Carpatho-Rusyn language”; critics called it “macaronic jargon,” or iazychiie.

By the twentieth century the term iazychiie was being used by supporters of each language orientation in an effort to denigrate their linguistic rivals. Local *Russophiles described the Ukrainian language as a mixture (iazychiie) of Galician “Russian” vernacular with Polish while the *Ukrainophiles depicted the efforts of Rusyns to write or speak in Russian as an “uncultured” mixture (iazychiie) of Russian with local “Ukrainian” vernacular. Both Russophiles and Ukrainophiles poked fun at efforts to create a codified literary language based on the Rusyn vernacular, describing the mixture of local speech with Russian, Church Slavonic, Slovak, Polish, or Hungarian borrowings as an amalgam (iazychiie) that “no people in the world speaks.”

Paul Robert Magocsi

Entry courtesy of Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture.
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