(News from March.)

The article is in Pannonian Rusyn, something Dulichenko has created a name for: a Slavic literary (=standard) microlanguage - the sort of language variety you don’t see in major overviews, a language without a nation-state’s backing, but not quite just a “dialect”, since it has a norm and is used in writing and possibly even official communication. Pannonian Rusyn is the language of the people who migrated from west Ukraine to Vojvodina (north Serbia) and Slavonia (NE Croatia) in 18th century. Other Slavic microlanguages recognised by Dulichenko included Rusyn in Ukraine, Slovakia and Poland (different from the one in Serbia and Croatia), isolated varieties of Croatian in Austria and Italy, Kashubian in Poland, Banat Bulgarian in Romania and Serbia…

Since machine translators will probably get wrecked by this text, I’ll try to roughly translate (though I never actually took the time to learn Rusyn specifically, just working off my knowledge of other Slavic languages) at least the first two paragraphs:

At 84 years of age, on the 4th of March Alexander Dmitrievich Dulichenko, a well-known slavist, has passed away. He was the first to fundamentally study all characteristics of Rusyn language and classify it into among microlanguages, where it stood out as the most developed, with its functional use approaching major Slavic literary languages.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Dulichenko was born on 30th October 1941 in Novoalexeyevska, Krasnodar Kray, in Russia. He graduated at the Turkmen University in Ashgabat, at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan studies in 1974, in Moscow he defended his bachelor thesis Literary Rusyn language of Yugoslavia, and then in 1980 at the Linguistics Institute of Belarisuan Academy of Sciences in Minsk attained PhD on the basis of the dissertation on the problem of formation and development of Slavic literary microlanguages. […] Prof. Dulichenko was particularly interested in the language of Bačka-Syrmia (Pannonian) Rusyns, and learned it by reading the publications of the instute Ruske Slovo (Rusyn Word). Several times he has visited our institute, as well as held lectures for our students at the Department of Rusyn studies in Novi Sad.