Maintaining the Standard Ukrainian Language: A Challenge for Teachers in Australia

The paper deals with problems of preservation of the Ukrainian language in Australia, based on the 25-year experience of one of the authors, in teaching Ukrainian studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. Against a background of growing assimilation and the dying away of Multiculturalism as a government policy, the authors examine the structure and history of the Ukrainian community in order to explain the characteristics of dialect-influenced spoken Ukrainian, and set up categories for the other main phenomena of linguistic interference in the areas of phonology and morphosyntax.
As a parallel concern, they consider a problem with special relevance in the Ukrainian homeland today, at a time when the direction of language planning is an important issue: the gap between modern standard Ukrainian and the different varieties of Ukrainian found in the diaspora.