Reviews Vajnko,Juraj. 7he Language of Slovakia's Rusyns.Classics of Carpatho-Rusyn Scholarship, i i, East European Monographs, 89. Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, New York. 2000. xix + II4 + xix + I2I pp. Price unknown. THE Ruthenian, orRusyn,dialectsof thePreiov Region ofEasternSlovakia Pjashivchina constitutethe core of but one of five bundlesof dialectsspoken by people who callthemselves,and mostlythinkof themselvesasRuthenians/ Rusyns, that is, as a people distinct from their neighbours. The other four groups are in the Lemko region of Poland, Subcarpathia (west Ukraine), Vojvodina (Yugoslavia)and in Hungary, not to mention the agile Rusyn communities of North America. The geographical continuity among several of the sub-groups of Rusyn dialects has been disrupted by geopolitical boundaries, which have led to increased fragmentation of 'Rusyn' as a (potential)language. There has been no single geopolitical 'pole' to exert any centralizing or unifying magnetic force, although lower-level, local poles do exist Presovin the presentcase. Thus each group, or at least some of them, has takenstepstowardsthe creation of locally standardizedforms.InJanuary 1995, a conference held at Presovassertedin no uncertaintermsthe linguistic independence of Rusyn, while recognizing that there was a long way to go before this could become a uniform reality for all time and for all the groups of Rusyn speakers.(Fora full account see Paul Robert Magocsi [ed.], A NewSlavicLanguage isBorn:TheRusynLiterayLanguage ofSlovakia, New York, I996.) The main issue is whether Rusyn is a trulyindependent linguistic entity and thus a 'new' member of the Slavonic family of languages, or whether it represents no more than a set of distinctive dialects of Ukrainian. Similar issues have been raised in the past, with the undoubted and successful emergence of Slovak, as distinct from Czech, in the I840s and I85os, the somewhat ambiguous independence of Cassubian (Kashubian) from Polish (treated as independent in Comrie and Corbett's The SlavonicLanguages, London and New York, I993, PP. 759-94), the 'locallypatriotic' attemptsin the twentieth century to create a literaryLachian, not Polish and not Czech (in Moravian Silesia),and the recurrentfailure(as in the I87os and i990s) of 'Moravian', again as distinct from Czech, to win whatever it requires to be accepted as a separatelinguisticentity. That these processesare not confined to the central and western area of Slavonic is attested, against a far more alarmingbackground,in South Slavonic, in formerYugoslavia,where out of the successfully operating, flexible monolith that was Serbo-Croat, three successor states have declared their own new national, geographically independent languages of Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian; ongoing linguopoliticalprocesseshave since soughtto hardenthe contoursof actuallinguistic separatenessas well. In an odd reversalof the processesby which Slavonic is becoming fragmented into ever smaller units, there has been a recent, somewhat maverick, attempt to describe modern Hebrew as a language that 708 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 has become Slavonic on the strength of the many Slavonic features it has absorbedthroughimmigrationinto Israelof Slavonic-speakingJews. The volume under review seeksto present the cruciallinguisticfacts of the Rusyn dialects of Eastern Slovakia. It pinpoints not only the areas in which they are distinctfrom Ukrainian (whichremainsthe language fromwhich the independence of Rusyn is being pre-eminently declared in the common perception), but also the areas of overlapwith, or crucialdifferencefrom, the contiguous Slovak (and in part also Polish). Significantly,and wisely, it does not seek to take sides with either the view that Rusyn is a separatelanguage, or the view that Rusyns are reallyUkrainiansand theirlanguage a version of Ukrainian, replaceablefor literary,intellectualor administrativepurposesby Ukrainian. It constitutes, then, a purely descriptive basis, using largely authentic examples, and presented in a discursivetext, structuredin such a way as to be loosely comparableto the chapterlayout in Comrie and Corbett. Avoiding the political aspects of the problem of the Rusyn 'language in the making' (see Paul Robert Magocsi in SEER, 74, I996, pp. 683-86), it also contains no referenceto the earlierlinguisticallyrelevant,but extra-linguistic, especially theological, liturgical, history of the Rusyns (for which see, for example, Elaine Rusinko, 'Between Russia and Hungary: Foundations of Literature and National Identity in Subcarpathian Rus", SEER, 74, I996, pp. 422-44); such aspectswill remain relevantwhatever the final outcome of the status of Rusyn. While a formal 'declaration of independence' of the Rusyn literarylanguage was made on 27 January I995 (see Magocsi, A New SlavicLanguage...