Southwestern dialects

Southwestern dialects. A group consisting of the Podilian dialects, South Volhynian dialects, Dnister dialects, Sian dialects, Lemko dialects, Transcarpathian dialects, Hutsul dialect, and Bukovyna-Pokutia dialects. Together with the group of southeastern dialects (the boundary between the two groups runs along the line Fastiv–Pervomaisk (Mykolaiv oblast)–Tyraspil), they form the basic southern group of Ukrainian dialects. The dialects differ from the northern dialects in the change, independently of stress, of the ancient vowels ō, ē into i (u, ü, ’u, ’ü in the subdialects of the Carpathian Mountains region), ě into ’i, and ę into ’a (’e [’y], ’i in the subdialects of Bukovyna and central Galicia), and in morphological, syntactic, and lexical peculiarities. They differ from the southeastern dialects in retaining many phonetic and morphological archaisms and allowing fewer phonetic innovations. (See map: Ukrainian dialects.)

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]