Zhylko, Fedot

Zhylko, Fedot [Жилко, Федот; Žylko], b 14 March 1908 in Solovtsovtsy, Penza gubernia, Russia, d 17 December 1995 in Pushkino, Moscow oblast, Russian Federation. Ukrainian dialectologist and linguistic geographer. A graduate of the Kyiv Institute of Professional Education (1932; see Kyiv Institute of People's Education), he taught Ukrainian language and dialectology in Kyiv’s postsecondary schools (1938–51). He headed the Dialectology Division of the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1950. The coauthor of programs for collecting dialectal data (1939, 1948), he wrote a textbook on Ukrainian dialectology (1951), a prospectus for a Ukrainian dialectological atlas (1952), monographs on Ukrainian dialectology (doctoral diss, 1955; rev edn 1966) and the Ukrainian dialects (1958), and many dialectological articles. He edited the periodicals Ukraïns’ka mova v shkoli (1951–60; see Ukraïns’ka mova i literatura v shkoli) and Dialektolohichnyi biuleten’ (nos 6–9, 1956–62), collections of the proceedings of the 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th republican dialectological conferences (1961, 1965, 1971, 1970), and collections of articles on the Middle Dnipro dialects (1960), Ukrainian linguistic geography (1966), and Ukrainian dialectal morphology (1969). In his dissertation he posited the existence of three original Ukrainian dialectal groups: the northern dialects, southwestern dialects, and southeastern dialects.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]