\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tYuri Bilinsky<\/a>
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\n\t\t\t\tHistory and Memory<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
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Folklore project manager Ruslana Lotsman (with the microphone) together with the Krynychenka collective in Velyke Verbche, Rivne region, Ukraine. Source: savelanguageandculture.org<\/p>\n
As a boy of six or seven years old in the 1970s, I loved to stroll along my granny\u2019s clay-paved street in the bucolic central Ukrainian village of Helmiaziv. In the evenings, I could hear voices singing local \u201cvillage songs\u201d, where a matriarch or younger woman would finish a verse with a distinctive long sound after the other singers fell silent. This was the practice of the tiahty lenchyka.<\/p>\n
Back then, I never imagined that this beautiful tradition might one day disappear. But today, just as more than 3,000 languages around the world face extinction<\/a>, Ukraine\u2019s rich tapestry of dialects and folk singing teeters on the edge \u2014 threatened by modern life, global cultural drift, and now, war.<\/p>\n In my childhood, the sweet sound of \u201cvillage songs\u201d was not confined to Helmiaziv. I heard it echo through the open windows of crumbling high-rises in Donetsk, my home city in eastern Ukraine. Although I was aware that Donetsk had a different cultural flavour, the singing felt familiar \u2014 something \u201cfolks\u201d did as they gathered to chat and share a drink after work.<\/p>\n Later, I began to wonder if this singing style had been carried to Donetsk by recent settlers from central Ukraine? Or was it locals from the Donetsk suburbs \u2014 places like Staromykhailivka or Maryinka (the second now destroyed by the Russian onslaught) \u2014 who had practiced these traditions for centuries? The region\u2019s rich Ukrainian ethnographic history starkly contrasts with President Putin\u2019s claim that the Donbas is culturally Russian.<\/p>\n By the 1990s, the silence had started to settle in. In Donetsk, spontaneous folk singing had vanished. In Helmiaziv, I could still hear it occasionally, though more faintly. The ancient sound now flickered at the edges of memory.<\/p>\n As Ukrainian folklore researcher Natalie Kononenko of the University of Alberta has pointed out, it is remarkable how Ukraine, despite its trauma and upheaval in the 20th century, managed to preserve a folk culture that closely resembled what was once recorded by ethnographers in the 19th century.<\/p>\n One reason for this resilience was that rural Ukrainians were not fully exposed to global mass culture until 60 or 70 years after the rest of Europe. That insulation \u2014 like that which preserved indigenous languages in the Americas or Asia \u2014 bought the traditions time.<\/p>\n But the clock is running out. We are now living through the final moments of that continuity.<\/p>\n Verbychenka youth collective from Nova Vodolaha, Kharkiv region of Ukraine, 120 km to the front line. Source: YouTube screenshot<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s singing tradition, which holds an astounding estimated repertoire of more than 200,000 folk songs, is not yet gone. Folk groups still exist, made up of septuagenarians and octogenarians who sing in the same timbre their ancestors used two centuries ago. There are also youth ensembles striving to carry that torch.<\/p>\n Yet the unique timbre of the Ukrainian \u201cvillage voice\u201d \u2014 full of weight and resonance \u2014 is now fading fast. Globalization, digital culture and the fragmentation of family ties have broken the chain of transmission. The songs still exist and the dialects are still spoken. But the threads that once passed them on, from grandmother to grandchild, are fraying.<\/p>\n Nina Reva, the legendary leader of the Drevo folk ensemble \u2014 whose haunting vocals helped make A Dog\u2019s Life<\/a> into a global animation success \u2014 once told me:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen your father teaches you to sing, your singing sounds different than when you learn to sing at an older age.\u201d<\/p>\n I think of that when I listen to 20-year-old Anna Khrystenko\u2019s striking rendition<\/a> of the Poltava-Kaniv dialect. Her voice captures it almost effortlessly, far more naturally than I can. She is a rare case \u2014 one of the few born into the dialectal environment in time to absorb it. Most others are trying to recreate something they never truly knew. Many newer groups, especially those formed in cities, no longer sound like the village babkas of memory \u2014 the timbre is just not the same.<\/p>\n The same slow erasure is happening to spoken dialects. For decades, the Iron Curtain shielded Ukrainians\u2019 authentic folklore from the influences of global consumerism and mass media. It also helped preserve the incredible wealth of Ukrainian dialects well into the early 2000s. But since then, the decline has accelerated. Among younger generations, phonetic and lexical loss is now widespread.<\/p>\n And now, there is war.<\/p>\n Ukraine has lost so much \u2014 lives, homes, whole cities and villages. Beneath this visible destruction, there is another kind of loss: intangible, but no less real. The old songs, the dialectal patterns, the living memory of a region\u2019s speech and melody \u2014 these too are vanishing. We cannot afford to lose this cultural inheritance alongside everything else.<\/p>\n In 2021, I began working with children from Helmiaziv through a grassroots project designed to reconnect them with the songs and dialect of their grandparents. At first, their efforts were stiff. The soft Poltava-Kaniv accent, once spoken by nearly everyone in the village, had already faded. Even their distinctive alveolar \u201cl\u201d sound had disappeared.<\/p>\n Then, something astonishing happened.<\/p>\n With guidance from dedicated mentors \u2014 drawing on original recordings<\/a> and direct interaction with authentic speakers and tradition-bearers \u2014 and yes, some small material incentives, the students began to sing and speak like their grandmothers. And they began to love it. One student told her mentor, \u201cI will now speak my dialect even at school.\u201d Her voice \u2014 both literally and symbolically \u2014 offers hope.<\/p>\n Folklore project manager Ruslana Lotsman interviews Kateryna Samoylenko in Helmiaziv, Cherkasy region of Ukraine, as part of the effort to transfer authentic dialect and folk songs to participants of the Kalyniata children\u2019s folklore collective. Source: YouTube screenshot<\/p>\n Some of Ukraine\u2019s most endangered dialects and singing traditions lie in areas now devastated or depopulated by Russia\u2019s invasion. Tragically, these were already on the verge of extinction before the war. Now, they risk disappearing without a trace.<\/p>\n Take the dialects of easternmost Slobozhanshchyna, near the Russian border. Some of their features are known, while others are barely documented. But none have been properly preserved or even digitized. We need to act \u2014 not later, not once the war is over, but now \u2014 while there are still voices that remember.<\/p>\n This work is not just about Ukraine. It is a model. A reminder that even with modest resources and the right spark, it is possible to reverse cultural decline \u2014 to remind young people that what they thought was gone is still alive inside them. And that it is worth saving.<\/p>\n Even in the face of devastation, cultural treasures can endure \u2014 but only if we choose to hear them, before the last voice fades.<\/p>\n Yuri Bilinsky<\/strong> is the founder of the \u201cSave Your Granny\u2019s Language and Culture\u201d project<\/a>, which is funded by the Temerty Family Foundation and Canada Ukraine Foundation. The project motivates Ukrainian youth to replicate original pronunciations, vocabularies and folk songs down to the tiniest details that have been lost in their everyday lives.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\theritage<\/a>, Russian invasion of Ukraine<\/a>, Singing<\/a>, Ukrainian culture<\/a>\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A grassroots project is working to revive the dialects and folk traditions that have all but disappeared from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[2000,299,28066,33459,25135,657,53564],"class_list":{"0":"post-119887","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-heritage","11":"tag-russian-invasion-of-ukraine","12":"tag-singing","13":"tag-ukraine","14":"tag-ukrainian-culture"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114546058505632216","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}