CODIFICATION OF THE LEMKO VARIANT OF RUSYN

Codification of the Presov Region variant of the Rusyn language, officially announced in January 1995 in Bratislava, Slovakia, was greeted by the international Rusyn community and national minority organizations throughout Europe. At the present time, attempts are being made to codify the Lemko variant of Rusyn. Initial work has focused on the creation of children's school texts, anthologies, and dictionaries. Such projects strengthen and standardize the building blocks of a language - its grammar, vocabulary, spelling - and serve to spread the knowledge of and acceptance of the codification efforts among the general population in whose hands the fate of a language ultimately resides.

In early 1995, the Lemko-Rusyn poet Petro Trochanovskij published an anthology of poetry for children, Mamko, kup mi knizku (Mom, Buy Me A Book). The anthology, including poetry from all Carpatho-Rusyn regions of Europe, was published by the Lemko Association (Stovarysynja Lemkiv) with funds from the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art.

Myroslava Chomjak, a Lemko language teacher and author of several children's grammar texts and readers, likewise has had the second part of her colorfully-illustrated 70-page children's primer, Vcyme i bavime sja (Let's Learn and Play), published by the Lemko Association. Chomjak is also currently at work on an interregional dictionary of the Rusyn language, which provides all the dialectical variants of words in a given Carpatho-Rusyn region and then contrasts them with the dialectical variants of the same word from other Carpatho-Rusyn regions. Chomjak expects to have a completed first draft of the dictionary ready for peer review at the Fourth World Congress of Rusyns, to be held in Budapest, Hungary in May 1997.