Oxana Matiychuk

Research Fellow

contact:

through dathe@europa-uni.de

Vita

Vita

Dr. Oxana Matiychuk (born 1977) studied German and Ukrainian language and literature at the Yuri Fedkovych University in Chernivtsi. From 1998 to 2002 she worked in the Austria Library at the Bukovina Center at the university. She was a multiple scholarship holder of the Robert Bosch Foundation, DAAD and Erasmus Mundus program. Since 2005 she has been working in the International Office of the University of Chernivtsi, since July 2022 she has been the Deputy Head there. She teaches at the Department of Foreign Literary History and Theory. Oxana Matiychuk received her PhD in 2010 on “Genesis of the Poetic Text in the Work of Rose Ausländer” from the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv.

Project: “Multilingualism in Bukovina: Historical Outline and the Current Situation”

With regard to the language situation in the historical land of Bukovina, one generally assumes a multilingualism paradigm. However, the language constellation and the language legal framework changed after each change of power that Bukovina experienced. The period before 1918 is characterized by a particular complexity of linguistic relations in the easternmost crown land of the Danube Monarchy. The German language, which had not functioned in Bukovina until 1774, became the national language after Austria took over Bukovina; Romanian and Ukrainian (Ruthenian), as the languages of the largest autochthonous ethnic groups, had the status of official languages. The steady population increase that followed the annexation also meant the “immigration” of new languages. In the interwar period (1919-1940), Bukovina became part of the Kingdom of Romania. Two decades of strong Romanianization followed, with German largely retaining its status as an educational language, its internal prestige. Other languages were able to withstand the pressure of the rigorous language policy to varying degrees. The consequences of the Second World War meant a fundamental change in the political, ethnic and demographic composition of the population and thus in the language constellation. While Northern Bukovina was annexed to the Ukrainian SSR, Southern Bukovina remained part of Romania. In Soviet Bukovina, as in all other regions of the Soviet Union, Russian achieved absolute supremacy and was considered a prestigious language. However, Yiddish was widely spoken here until the 1980s, and Ukrainian and Romanian in rural areas. In the southern part, language homogenization with Romanian gradually took place. After 1991, the Russian language in the Chernivtsi oblast – unlike in the neighboring region of Galicia, for example – retained its dominant position in almost all areas of social life for a long time. The education system was gradually converted to Ukrainian. In general, the language situation can be described as the coexistence of three most widely spoken languages – Ukrainian, Romanian and Russian, with individual language competencies varying and depending on various factors (origin, age, socialization, education, location-specific language environment, etc.). Due to the war, the region became a temporary or permanent new home for many IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons, estimated number about 60,000, as of July 2023), the majority of whom are native Russian speakers. However, it is hardly to be expected that the importance of Russian would increase – except temporarily as a colloquial language – due to Russia’s war of aggression complex processes of identity (re)finding are currently taking place, the role of the recent “mother tongue as a murderer’s language” is reflected and critically addressed at least by intellectuals.