(WHETHER) WHAT IS WORTH KNOWING ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE UKRAINIAN LITERARY LANGUAGE WHILE LEARNING IT AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (THE END OF THE X – XVIII CENT.)

Abstract

As the interest to the Ukrainian language is currently growing it is worth deepening the lingual and country study aspect of the Ukrainian language as a foreign language by involving the history – key stages of the Ukrainian language formation and development as a literary language. The war has made people get to know the Ukrainian language mainly as the language of resistance to the russian invasion and, therefore, become interested in its history. It became necessary to briefly outline the main stages of the historical formation of the Ukrainian language as a written and literary one, starting from the earliest times, and at the same time to emphasize its identity and self-sufficiency, which didn’t depend on ‘’ruskii mir’’. The ancient Ukrainian and middle Ukrainian periods of the formation of the Ukrainian literary language have been considered. The main language creation tendencies have been determined in each context. The initial ancient Ukrainian period, at the end of the X – the middle of the XIV centuries, lay the basis for the language creation tendency, penetrating of live conversational features into written texts at different extent (depending on a subject,a genre, a purpose) and at different linguistic levels. It became the foundation for the language development, affirmation and resistance to the future social and historical challenges. From the middle of the XIV century business literature represented the Ukrainian language as the official one in the ethnically foreign country, thus pushing forward the implementation of folk colloquial features and asserting this language for the future. The period between the XVI and the first half of the XVII centuries showed the ability of the Ruthenian-Ukrainian language to provide a new sphere to itself – a religious one, displacing Church Slavonic. It determined a high social status and prestige of the Ukrainian language as the internal and external identifying factor in the contemporary society. Different social and political conditions of Naddnipriavshchyna under russian rulership, Galychyna as a part of Poland, and later of the Austrian empire, determined unequal intensity and social severity of language creation processes in the second half of the XVII- XVIII centuries, which were, yet, aimed at the common direction of the literary language on a live colloquial basis. Key words: the history of the Ukrainian language, periodization, language creation tendencies, written records.