L'ucraino tra le lingue slave

This article is, to a certain extent, the continuation of a previous, not yet published paper, devoted to “a socio-linguistic characterization of Ukrainian”. One of the substantial differences between the two contributions consists in the descriptive character of the former paper which was essentially addressed to a non-specialist reader. The present study instead intends to provide a theoretical framework in which to evaluate the place Ukrainian occupies among other Slavic languages. To this end, the first part of the contribution reviews the crucial linguistic debates which took place in the 19th and 20th centuries about the linguistic status to be attributed to the Ukrainian language within the Slavic family. A description accounting for the most typical linguistic features of Ukrainian compared with other Slavic languages, particularly East Slavic, follows. First those historical traits commonly associated with East Slavic are dealt with, and then the distinctive features which make Ukrainian an autonomous language. The second part of the research focusses on more recent comparative and typological classifications of Ukrainian providing interesting food for thought for future research. The conclusive section discusses the relevance of turning to a typology of Ukrainian based on a lexical parameter since this is the most distinctive language part of standard Ukrainian. This study, still in the preliminary stages, has in fact confirmed that a classification of Ukrainian based on lexical criteria gives different outcomes than research based on phonetic, morphological or syntactic ones. The determination of the real degree of genetic and typological affinity may in fact be strongly affected by the language levels analyzed and by the criteria selected for comparison, showing typological similarity either towards one or another language. For example, although according to certain phonetic parameters, e.g. vocalism, lack of (or very limited) reduction, syllabic harmony etc., Ukrainian tends to be closer to South Slavic, particularly to Serbian, lexically, a highly stylized variety of standard Ukrainian tends to be closer to West Slavic rather than to Russian. Overall the study confirmed that the language, closest to Ukrainian is Belarusian, whichever parameters are used. This is followed, either by Polish and/or Russian, according to the criteria selected.