Acceso usuarios
The Zakarpattia region in southwestern Ukraine is stereotyped as an area of great linguistic diversity, with a number of discrete ethnic groups speaking their eponymous languages, as well as a range of local Slavic varieties that are variably perceived as dialects of Ukrainian or deployed as evidence of long-standing links to another Slavic language, Rusyn. In this article, I focus on the ways in which different language ideologies mediate language use, and perceptions of that use by Zakarpattia residents. In the first half of the article, I focus on the conceptualization of language and ethnicity as being in natural alignment as one of the key ideological positions that unite differing political orientations toward the classification of languages in Zakarpattia. In the second half of the article, I describe a set of local language ideologies and consider how these ideologies govern the interpretation of everyday language use between members of groups that are variably defined as similar or different depending on context.
