SVIATOSLAV KARAVANSKYI «ON THE RESTORATION OF NATIONAL FEATURES OF THE UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE»

Abstract

The article for the first time investigates the language laboratory of «restoration of national features of the Ukrainian language» at the main language levels in the works of modern Ukrainian linguist-classicist Sviatoslav Karavanskyi (1920-2016), who laid the foundations of modern theory and practice of language culture.

He managed to do the impossible: despite 30 years spent behind the wires of Soviet concentration camps and 37 years in exile in the USA, he preserved and published specific «national features of the Ukrainian language». This led to significant processes of de-Sovietization of the Ukrainian language and the formation of the linguistic and national consciousness of post-Soviet Ukrainians. His works on the problems of language culture and spelling became the basis of the linguistic and national revival of the early 90s of the twentieth century.

S. Karavanskyi introduced into the sociolinguistic space the basic interdisciplinary terms, such as denationalization, linguicide, ethnocide, hybridism, the language of the occupier, and Stalin's yaryzhka. From the perspective of these terms, he revealed the tragedy of the destruction of the distinctive features of the Ukrainian language at all language levels and outlined ways to restore it.

He turned the preserved and restored language norm, in contrast to the «artificial pseudo-Ukrainian Koine», into a national ideology as an indispensable condition for the revival of the Ukrainian state itself. This is really a maintenance of the Ohiienko’s line in our linguistics, when the researcher outgrows the very object of his studies, reaching the highest horizons of serving his culture at the cost of his own life. The national features of the Ukrainian language restored by S. Karavanskyi became the basis for the decolonized theory of language culture and the specific practice of its use.