The Vanishing Galician Lexicon and How It Lingers in the Diaspora

When I moved to Ukraine, I had to learn a whole new Ukrainian vocabulary. It turned out that I had grown up speaking a Galician/diasporan Ukrainian, which used many dialectisms, Polonisms, and archaisms. To keep track of the differences between the two lexicons, as well as to document the way my family spoke, I started to put together a dictionary. I ended up with a rather comprehensive list, and as I know many other families in the Ukrainian diaspora use a similar lexicon to the one I grew up with, I decided to make it public. Ultimately, it’s an attempt to help preserve the western Ukrainian dialect that is still spoken in North America, but which is slowly being lost.