History of Ukrainian Language Use
Prior to the First World War the Anglo-Canadian authorities in many areas did allow some Ukrainian-language instruction in public schools, as minority language rights had been given a degree of protection early in the history of the West, during the Manitoba Schools Question. However, during the war era nativist attitudes came to the fore and all minority language rights were revoked. Speaking Ukrainian in school was expressly forbidden by Anglo-Canadian authorities for most of the mid-20th Century. Ukrainian would not again be spoken in Western Canadian public schools until policy of multiculturalism became official in the 1960s.
Economically, Ukrainian speakers in Canada tended to lag behind others because of the need for English in most fields of labour. Ukrainians also faced ridicule and intimidation from some in the majority community for not speaking English only, particularly if they moved outside the majority ethnic-Ukrainian rural Bloc Settlements. Those migrating to other rural areas or from the countryside to nearby cities such as Edmonton and Winnipeg were often quicker to lose their language. Ukrainian language use became associated with rural backwardness and went into relative decline, and would only increase with the introduction of a new wave of post-war immigrant speakers who spoke, by and large, a Modern or Standard Ukrainian.
Ukrainian immigrants who arrived in Canada after the Second World War, generally do not speak Canadian Ukrainian.
Read more about this topic: Canadian Ukrainian
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or language:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)