Is there a Kharkiv dialect of the Ukrainian language? Indeed, there is! In any case, it certainly existed 150 years ago—as the poet and ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev-Chuzhbinsky wrote. In the mid-1850s, on behalf of Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich (son of emperor Nicholas I), he traveled to the Ukrainian and Moldavian lands to study the way of life and customs of the local population.

In the first part of the book *A Journey to Southern Russia: Essays on the Dnieper*, published as far back as 1861, he identified four varieties of the Ukrainian language:

1. “The language is pure and is spoken in the following provinces: Poltava and Yekaterinoslav, in the southern and eastern (Dnieper) districts of the Kyiv Governorate, in the southern districts of the Chernihiv Governorate and in the Kherson Governorate, as well as in the Black Sea region;
2. Adverbs with a predominance of Polish loanwords: in the Podolsk, Volyn, and other districts of the Kyiv Governorate—very similar to the Belarusian dialect;
3. The Kharkiv dialect—spoken in the Kharkiv Governorate and parts of the Voronezh and Kursk Governorates—is derived from the Chervonorussian dialect, though it has undergone certain changes due to its close proximity to Great Russia. This also includes the Land of the Don Army (the Kharkiv Governorate is populated by immigrants from across the Dnieper, who brought their own pronunciation with them);
4. “The Chernihiv dialect, spoken in the northern counties of the Chernihiv Governorate, bears a strong resemblance to Belarusian.”

Thus, we see that the Kharkiv dialect of the Ukrainian language was spoken not only in “Sloboda Ukraine,” which encompassed parts of the present-day Belgorod, Voronezh, and Kursk regions, but also in the Don Cossack Region (now the Rostov Region).

It is also interesting to note that Afanasyev-Chuzhbinsky classifies the Kharkiv dialect as part of the Chervonorussky dialect, that is, the dialect that predominated in the historical region of Galicia. This once again confirms the fact that the ancestors of Kharkiv’s residents were not merely settlers from across the Dnieper, but Ukrainians from the western part of present-day Ukraine who fled to the uninhabited lands of what would become Sloboda Ukraine during Khmelnytsky Uprising.