In terms of language, Galician Russophiles were strongly opposed to the adoption of the vernacular Ukrainian language spoken by peasants and instead supported the adoption of standard literary Russian. This opposition was such that they even welcomed the ban on the Ukrainian language in the Russian Empire in 1876. Reflecting their belief that the people of Ukraine played a special role in the greater Russian nation, the leading Russophile thinker Ivan Naumovich declared that the Russian language was derived from "Little Russian" and was only being readopted in Galicia. Indeed, Galician Russophiles wrote that one of the reasons for all East Slavs to adopt the Russian language was that the modern Russian language had been created in the 17th and 18th centuries by scholars from Ukraine.