Slavomír Ondrejovič (Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics)
On the Eastern Slovak Linguistic Separatism
It is generally assumed that Ľ. Štúr codified the standard Slovak on the basis of central
Slovak dialects, which is supported also by his own claim. The newer analysis shows,
however, that the basis for Štúr’s codification was the language of scholars in central
Slovak towns (especially of Liptovský Mikuláš).
The choice of the central Slovak concept for the basis of the standard language isconsidered to be the reason for the success of Štúr’s codification and failure ofBernolák’s codification, who had attempted such codification even before Štúr, on thebasis of Trnava scholars’ usage. Štúr laid the basis of standard Slovak via his works
Nauka reči Slovenskej (1846) and Nárečja Slovenskuo (1846), but the important thing is,that he managed to overcome the linguistic-confessional split between thebernolakovian Catholics and evangelicals writing in biblical Czech.
However, not everyone was content with this Štúr’s step at the time (but alsolater). Ján Kollár wanted to remain by (slovakized) Czech, which had been used before
by Slovaks as a literary language, later he promoted the so called old Slovak. Otherauthors, who had supported the bernolakovian tradition, wanted to constitute thestandard Slovak on the basis of western Slovak. It is pointed at also today, that western
Slovak had been prepared for this role better than central Slovak. It disposed with not
only the Bernolák’s grammar of Slavic (= Slovak) language, but also with hismultivolume dictionary. Štúr had prepared the grammar and also the claim for hisSlovak, but he never published a dictionary.
A different concept is presented by the authors, who are convinced that the mostsuitable basis for constituting standard Slovak at the time was neither central norwestern, but eastern Slovak. This view was defended by the historian Ondrej Halaga in
the Svojina magazine and he later summarized it in Východoslovenský slovník (EasternSlovak Dictionary) (2002). According to this view, eastern Slovak originated “viaCzech”. However, it can be shown, that at the time, when Czech came to the Slovak
territory, Slovak functioned as the language of the Slovak ethnic group in the form ofdialects, cultivated local varieties as well as folk literary production, and alsosupradialectical units. Neither his thesis, that at the time Czech was the language ofpeople (lingua vernacular) in Eastern Slovakia, nor that the eastern Slovak, in which theCalvinist books of the 18th century were written, originated by the“easternslovakization” of Czech (Štefan Švagrovský), can be defended.

The eastern Slovak was perceived by several philologists of the Slovak past(Matej Bel, Ľudovít Štúr, Samo Czambel) with certain contemn. O. Halaga argues,
however, that at the time, it was precisely eastern Slovak which functioned as the “noblelanguage” at least in the way, that it was used by “gentlemen” as well, whereas thecentral Slovak was only a Wallachian language, the language of raftsmen and thelanguage of the lowest layers of society without any literary tradition.
The Šariš standard language was “exported” also abroad at the end of the 80s inth
the 19 century. Some newspapers were published in it also in the USA, but thislanguage remained a political issue also after establishing the Czechoslovak Republic.
The eastern Slovak separatism survived at home also after 1918 (slovjacké spolky –Slovjak associations). The last attempts to resurrect the eastern Slovak as the standard
language were possible to observe after the Vienna Award 1938 – 1945, when a part of
Slovakia was devolved to Hungary and was misused for political (“separatist”) goals.