Ivan speaking Pannonian Rusyn

Ivan speaks Pannonian Rusyn, a variety of Rusyn from Croatia and Serbia. Also known as Ruthenian, it is a Slavic language. It is an official language of the Vojvodina province. Russian and Ukranian are close linguistic relations. This video was recorded by Robert Keresztesy in Novi Sad, Serbia. Rusyn is an East Slavic language closely related to Ukrainian and Russian. Rusyn is spoken by as many as 700,000 people across Eastern Europe, in particular, Slovakia, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, Hungary, and Czechia. It is the ancestral language of the Rusyns, descendants of the Slavic peoples who settled the Eastern Carpathian mountains in Late Antiquity. Though never politically sovereign, the Rusyn people have a strong cultural identity, with their own institutions and mother-tongue media across Eastern Europe. Ivan’s variety of Rusyn, Pannonian, is spoken by about 20,000 people in Serbia, where it is a recognized minority language, as well as in Croatia. Linguists are divided as to whether Pannonian Rusyn is a variety of the broader Rusyn language or an independent language in its own right. Ivan’s opinion on the matter is not yet clear to us, but we hope to learn more—and will let you know when we do! This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org.