Abstract:
The political situation in Eastern Halychyna during its time as a member of the Austrian-Hungarian state was rather ambiguous. On the one hand, the Constitution guaranteed equal national rights to all nationalities in the state. Each subject of the state had the right to develop their nationality and mother tongue. However, Halychyna Ukrainians could not make use of this right because the Poles considered this territory as their own and tried in various ways to assimilate the Eastern Halychynians. In almost every field of public life, local Polish officials have introduced Polish as a government language. The local population could not obtain the rights for their language, so they had to apply to the central government in Vienna. The issues of Ukrainian language functioning in Eastern Halychyna have been repeatedly raised at the meetings of the Austrian Parliament. The Ukrainian ambassadors made submissions trying to justify the usage of two regional languages in Halychyna. In these submissions, the Ukrainians emphasized that they did not want to restrict the rights of the Polish language, but only demanded the possibility to use Ukrainian language in communication with the Ukrainian population in government offices and courts. The Ukrainian ambassadors argued, reminding in a historical retrospective of the continuous development of the Ukrainian language, being used in ancient Poland and being a government language at the time when Halychyna was a part of other state entities, including Lithuania. The Polish ambassadors of Halychyna were in opposition to this desire. They invented various arguments, emphasizing that the official language in Halychyna was only Polish, and the introduction of two regional languages into government would not bring any advantages to the region as well as the Austrian state.
