RSS
Home | Ethnic Group | Ukrainians
|
|
|
Today, a large Ukrainian minority have citizenship in the Russia, Canada, United States, Brazil and Kazahstan. According to some sources, around 20 million people outside of Ukraine are identified with the Ukrainian ethnicity.Ukraine therefore has one of the largest diasporas in the world. The oldest recorded names used for the Ukrainians are Rusychi, Rusyny, and Rusy (from Rus). In the 10th to 12th centuries those names applied only to the Slavic inhabitants of what is today the national and ethnic territory of Ukraine, but later a similar designation was adopted by the proto-Russian inhabitants of the northeastern principalities of Kievan Rus'. Despite centuries of foreign rule and distinct periods of Polonization and Russification, Ukrainians are not significantly less homogenous than western neighboring ethnic groups. However, many ethnic Ukrainians, in addition to having been descended from medieval Ruthenian stock, maintain various other ancestries including: Russian, Belarussian, Polish, Greek, German, Romanian, and/or Jewish. The modern name Ukraintsi (Ukrainians) is derived from Ukraina (Ukraine), a name first documented in 1187, there is, however, a lack of evidence that it had already an ethnic reference at this early moment (see the etymology of the term). The appellation ‘Ukrainian’ initially came into common usage in Central Ukraine and did not take hold in Galicia and Bukovyna until the first quarter of the 20th century, in Transcarpathia until the 1930s, and in the Preshov region until the late 1940s. Those Western Ukrainians have used the name Rusyny (Ruthenians) until national revival. In the last few decades of the 19th century Ukrainians under Russian rule began a massive emigration to the Asian regions of the empire, and their counterparts under Austro-Hungarian rule emigrated to the New World. |