Linguist Orysia Demska publishes a book about the Odesa language

Vihola Publishing House has opened a pre-order for a new book by linguist Orysia Demska, Odesa: A Story Told by the Steppe and the Sea.

According to the publisher, the book tells the linguistic history of Odesa and its inhabitants.

The author uses the historic coffee house of the Greek Simon Asporydi as a conventional setting for her story, where citizens who spoke different languages once gathered for a cup of coffee. It is as if the reader is among them and hears the echo of many languages that shaped the fate of the city.

"What language does Odesa speak? Greeks and Scythians, Turks and Crimean Tatars, Germans and Jews, French and Italians, and most importantly, Ukrainians. For centuries, very different people lived between the steppe and the sea, each speaking their own language. The "traditional" Russian-speaking city on the northern shore of the Black Sea is a kind of imperial myth that has been nurtured for years, rewriting historical sources and erasing names," the book's description says.

Orysia Demska is a Ukrainian linguist, Doctor of Philology, professor, organizer and first chair of the National Commission on State Language Standards, Great Teacher of the Ukrainian Leadership Academy, member of the Commission on Names of the Kyiv City State Administration, expert in science, language policy and culture. She is the daughter of Ukrainian linguist, professor Marian Demsky, and the sister of writer, literary critic, and doctor of philosophy Lesia Demska-Budzuliak.

Throughout her professional career, she has taught at Drohobych, Lviv, Wroclaw, Warsaw, Jagiellonian (Krakow), and Giessen Universities, and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. She is the co-author of the first Ukrainian dictionary of homonyms, a Ukrainian-Polish thematic dictionary, and a work on the Ukrainian linguistic genocide of the twentieth century; she is the author of scientific publications on lexicology, lexicography, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic landscape, and the politics of space.

Кирило Бойко