Cossacks/Kozaks

[John Dunn]

For understandable reasons there is, as far as I know, no serious study of the language of the Cossacks, though A.V. Mirtov, Donskoj slovar' (Rostov-on-Don, 1929; reprinted Leipzig/Letchworth, 1971)* is a useful starting point.  There is also an interesting chapter on surnames in the Don region in L.M. Shchetinin's Imena i nazvanija (R/D, 1968).  

What follows is largely conjectural and thus open to expansion and correction.  As I understand it, the Don Cossack community was established when some Cossacks were moved from the Dnepr to the upper Don region in the mid-to-late seventeenth century.  As the community expanded, both geographically and numerically, and as it did so (mostly) in isolation from other Ukrainian-speaking communities, the language was presumably subject to russification, which may have been greater, the further members of the community were moved from their Don settlement.  What does seem to have been the case, and this is strongly implied by Mirtov, is that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Don Cossacks had a distinct form of speech which could be contrasted both with Ukrainian and with the Russian of neighbouring non-Cossacks. 

Again, as I understand it, Ukrainian was widely used in the nineteenth-century Kuban (and characteristically Ukrainian surnames are widespread in the present-day Krasnodarskij kraj), but I have no information about whether there was a linguistic differentiation between Cossack and non-Cossack communities in that region.  Natalia Pylypiuk's information might suggest not, but this is not to take into account the cultural mangling of the Soviet period.  As an aside, I used to play to my students an extract from the 1980s BBC TV series 'Comrades', in which an elderly lady expressed her thoughts in a curious mixture of Ukrainian (possibly even Rusyn, but that's another argument) and Russian.  The challenge for the students was to try to come up with a definition of her language.  

I do not know how great a role linguistic separateness played among other factors in establishing the distinct Don Cossack identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor do I know what name, if any, they gave to their speech variety.  Contrary to our modern need to assign every phenomenon to neat categories, there is no compelling requirement to give your own form of speech a distinct name: those who signed the Vienna agreement of 1850 referred simply to 'naš jezik', and there are still dotted around the Slavonic world varieties known as 'po prostu' (Lithuania?) and 'na našu/po našu' (Molise, Italy).  I have, though, been a little surprised not to have found so far any traces of a revival of the Don Cossack language to accompany the general revival of a Cossack identity in the region during the post-Soviet period.  But perhaps I just haven't been looking hard enough.

John Dunn.

*Bradda Books, in case you were trying to make sense of that improbable combination of place names.

John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
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Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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