J.B. Rudnyckyj was a Ukrainian linguist who immigrated to Canada after World War 2 and had a significant impact on both academia and politics. He founded the Slavic Studies department at the University of Manitoba and advocated for the recognition of non-British and non-French ethnic groups in Canada. This led to the adoption of official multiculturalism in Canada. Rudnyckyj made valuable contributions to the study of Ukrainian language and folklore in Canada through his research and teaching. He played a key role in the establishment of Ukrainian Canadian studies as an academic field.

1. Thomas M. Prymak University of Toronto
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J. B. RUDNYCKYJ AND CANADA
Thomas M. Prymak
University of Toronto
B. Rudnyckyj (1910-1995), pronounced “rud-NITS-kee,” was one of the most important
and most controversial figures in the history of Ukrainians in Canada. A highly
cosmopolitan linguist and broadly educated academic, he was a post-1945 immigrant to
Canada, who adapted well to his new Canadian home, and quickly shot to the top of Ukrainian
Canadian society. For many years, he served as the head of the Department of Slavic Studies that
he had founded at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, at the eastern edge of the three
Prairie Provinces of Canada. Before 1970, Winnipeg was still the fourth largest city in the
country, and a significant part of the city’s population was of Ukrainian origin. Winnipeg, in
fact, was then generally acknowledged to be the “Ukrainian capital of Canada,” and since
Rudnyckyj lived and worked at the heart of both Ukrainian academic and political life in Canada,
this was reflected in both his academic and political careers.
Those careers coincided with an important phase in the general history of the country. By
the 1960s, Canada was already beginning to feel quite independent of the British Empire, of
which it had been an integral part since the 1760s. Over the course of first half of the twentieth
century, the Empire had been gradually replaced by the newer concept of the British
Commonwealth of Nations, its jewels being the self-governing “Dominions” of Canada and
Australia. But in the early 1960s, most of the rest of the old Empire had broken away and
acquired political independence. Consequently, the self-governing dominions began to change
their former imperial identities to newer ones, less dependent upon London and the British
element in their own populations.
In Canada, this change was complicated by the large and important French fact in
Quebec, and in that unique French-speaking province, a new nationalist movement arose, which
soon went beyond legal parliamentary methods and turned to political violence to achieve a more
narrow political independence, one centred on the province itself. In response, the federal
government in Ottawa called a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism to deal
with the crisis, and Rudnyckyj, who fluently spoke both French
and English, and was known for his cosmopolitanism, was soon
appointed to the Commission. He was expected to represent the
non-British and non-French element in its deliberations. From
this lofty perch, the Ukrainian linguist from Winnipeg pushed
hard for recognition of the then 27 percent of the country that
was not of British or French origin. The result was the new
federal policy of “Multiculturalism within a Bilingual
Framework.”
The linguist, Professor J. B. Rudnyckyj in 1963,
when he was first appointed to the
Royal Commission on Bilingualism
and Biculturalism. Courtesy of the
University of Manitoba Archives,
Winnipeg.
J

2. Thomas M. Prymak University of Toronto
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Rudnyckyj did not do this entirely on his own. He was greatly helped by his colleague
from the University of Manitoba, the historian and Conservative political activist, Paul Yuzyk,
who at that same time had been appointed to the Senate of Canada, and by numerous Ukrainian
Canadian political figures and activists, all of whom worked for the recognition of their group.
The combined effort of both the older “waves” of immigrants (which had been primarily
economic in nature), together with their children and grandchildren, and also the newer, post-
1945 immigrants (who were better educated and intensely political), and their children too (who
remained equally politically committed) turned out to be immensely successful, and official
multiculturalism was their reward.
Moreover, there is no doubt whatsoever that it was the Ukrainians, more than any other
“ethnic group” that led the charge in this battle for multiculturalism. They presented more briefs
to the Royal Commission than did any other group, they pushed harder for changes than did
anyone else, and their youth protested and demonstrated for their cause more effectively than did
the youth of any other group. Throughout the entire history of the Ukrainian group in Canada, in
fact, multiculturalism was probably its single most important political achievement. And Jaroslav
Rudnyckyj stood at the very centre of this great effort.
But politics was not Rudnyckyj’s main interest. Rather he was primarily a scholar, and he
always remained at heart a linguist, or a “philologist.” Although he knew many languages well,
he specialized in the Ukrainian language and its varied dialects, and he did a great deal of
research into the origin of Ukrainian words, especially personal and place names. He also made
significant contributions to the history of Ukrainian literature, to library studies, and to Ukrainian
bibliography. Moreover, when he first arrived in western Canada, he was fascinated by the
language of those earlier Ukrainian pioneers, which, for over half a century, had missed a
revolution and two world wars and developed independently from that in the Old Country, and
consequently, had acquired a distinctiveness all its own. This led him to the study of Ukrainian
folklore in Canada, and he contributed enormously to the establishment of that new field as well.
On another level, Rudnyckyj was
an enthusiastic scholar with enormous self-
confidence and great teaching abilities and
was able to inspire an entire generation of
students to carry on his legacy. His
graduate students found positions (some in
academia, and some elsewhere) across
North America, and they continued his
work for years afterwards. In fact, the
tradition of academic study of the
Ukrainian Canadians, which had been
inspired and developed by the linguist
Rudnyckyj (and augmented by his
contemporaries and colleagues, also post-1945ers, like the historian,
Mykhailo Marunchak in Winnipeg and the poet Yar Slavutych in Edmonton) stood in clear
contrast to the situation in the United States, where no such tradition was ever clearly
established, and where academic institutions such as the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
generally ignored the history of the community that had funded and founded it.

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Professor Jurij Darewych of Toronto, a former Rudnyckyj student, tells an interesting
story about the nature of Rudnyckyj’s interest in the language of the children and grandchildren
of those old Ukrainian Canadian pioneers. He stressed the professor’s great sense of humour and
once told me about several examples of items that Rudnyckyj had collected over the years. And
these examples too were not without a certain degree of humour. They linked language to
folklore, and they included the unusual political expression: “Vin bezhyt na maioru.” This was
supposed to mean: “He is running for mayor.” But in the language of contemporary Ukraine
meant: “He is running at the mayor!” Again, there was the common Winnipeg expression: “Vin
robyt dlia sytoho.” (He works for the city.) But in the formal Ukrainian of the Old Country, this
translates as: “He works for chubby, that is, the well-fed person!” Similarly, during the solemn
unveiling of the Shevchenko monument in Winnipeg in 1961, Rudnyckyj had observed a parade
entering the area and, as a Ukrainian marching band approached, heard the announcer say:
“Teper ide banda v ukrainskim shmatiu.” (“Here comes the Ukrainian marching band in native
costume.”) But to a newcomer from Europe this meant “Here come the mafia, or group of
rowdies, in Ukrainian rags,” which the philologist from Europe found quite amusing. Doubtless,
Rudnyckyj’s irrepressible jollity at such talk was irritating to his close Canadian colleague, Paul
Yuzyk, who was descended from those pioneers of old, and spoke their language, and not that of
the post 1945ers, or DPs (Displaced Persons), as they were called at the time! (In the 1930s, the
influential but idiosyncratic American author, H. L. Mencken, with the help of certain editors of
the New Jersey newspaper Svoboda (Liberty), had compiled similar Ukrainian American
examples for his important multi-volume work on The American Language.)
Rudnyckyj was also a scholar with a clear penchant for bold hypotheses, and Darewych
related one of them to me. In American scholarship, it has long been accepted that early working
class immigrants from Eastern Europe, especially from Galicia, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary,
and even to some extent Poland, were once labeled with the derogatory epithet “Bohunk.” This is
widely believed by professional folklorists to have been a conflation of the terms “Bohemian”
and “Hungarian.” But Rudnyckyj’s observations on the Canadian Prairies, where the descendants
of the Galicians formed an overwhelming majority of the Slavonic element, led him to believe
that the epithet rather originated in the Ukrainian exclamation “Oi Bohonku!” often used by
elderly women. This expression, of course, was a vocative (calling out) and diminutive
(endearing) form of the otherwise quite ordinary exclamation “Oh, dear God!”
Finally, Professor Darewych related to me another anecdote about Rudnyckyj, one that
threw some new light upon the often tense relationship between Rudnyckyj and Yuzyk.
Darewych said that in the early 1960s, the Rev. Wasyl Kushnir, who was a prominent Ukrainian
Catholic priest and the long-serving President of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, the
umbrella organization of most of the non-Communist Ukrainian organizations in the country,
was visiting the Darewych home in Winnipeg, when the Prime Minister of the time, John
Diefenbaker, called on the phone. Kushnir and the Prime Minister had a relatively close
relationship, and Kushnir , he said, was the moving spirit behind Diefenbaker’s famous pro-
Ukrainian speech to the United Nations General Assembly that had shortly before (September,
1960) aroused the great indignation of the Soviet delegation to that body.
“Dief,” as he was called in Canada, wanted to know Kushnir’s opinion about who in the
Ukrainian community would be a good candidate to name to the Senate of Canada before he left
office (as Dief had just lost a general election). Kushnir suggested Rudnyckyj, who was
enormously self-confident, politically adept, and firmly committed to Ukrainian causes. But
Diefenbaker rejected Rudnyckyj, since he was a relatively recent immigrant, who had not been

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born in the country. Therefore, Kushnir suggested the linguist’s historian colleague at the
University of Manitoba, Paul Yuzyk. The Prime Minister, who had known Yuzyk in the 1930s as
a fellow Conservative in Saskatchewan, accepted the idea, and the historian was then named to
the Senate. But the story did not end there. Shortly later, the government changed, and
Diefenbaker’s rival, the new Liberal Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson, named Rudnyckyj to that
famous Royal Commission.
The socio-political child of the Royal Commission, official Canadian “multiculturalism,”
was in fact the joint legacy of both Rudnyckyj and Yuzyk, as well as of the Ukrainian
community in Canada as a whole. Its great importance to the country is indicated by the fact that
the word “multiculturalism” was put into the new Constitution of Canada in 1982, was further
On October 9, 1971, the very day after announcing to the
Parliament of Canada the new government policy of
“Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework,” the new Prime
Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who had three years before, taken
over from Lester B. Pearson, as leader of the country, flew 1,300
miles from Ottawa to Winnipeg, and spoke on the same subject to
the great Tri-annual Conference of the Ukrainian Canadian
Committee. The photo shows the PM speaking, while the Rev.
Wasyl Kushnir (with the eye-glasses) and another cleric are
looking up at him from the head table. Both Rudnyckyj and
Darewych were present at this important meeting. Darewych even
gave a keynote speech enunciating Ukrainian desiderata to the
federal government, and that speech appears to have had some
effect on Trudeau. Press photo from Novyi shliakh (The New
Pathway), Winnipeg, vol. XLII, no. 44, October 30, 1971.
defined by statute in 1988, and was also adopted by several provincial governments, including
those of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. It turned out to be a major event in
Canadian history. But Rudnyckyj’s legacy went far beyond politics.
Its principal component was in scholarship. The professor from Manitoba made solid
contributions to Ukrainian linguistics, compiling a great Ukrainian-German Dictionary, and a
multi-volume (but unfinished) Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (in which he
even gave meanings in English), also many smaller books on the origins of the name “Ukraine,”
the name “Slav,” the name “Galicia,” and on Ukrainian dialects and grammar, and also on
Canadian place names of Ukrainian origin. Moreover, he published an entire series of source
materials on Ukrainian Canadian folklore, and another series on Ukrainian libraries in Canada.
His unpublished survey of the Ukrainian holdings of the Library of Congress in Washington was
also quite important. To this must be added as well several short volumes on his wide travels
throughout the world, and his description of the Ukrainian elements and connections in those
many different societies. J. B. Rudnyckyj, who was both a prolific scholar and a successful
Royal Commissioner, has bequeathed us a legacy that lasts, and to the present day, continues to
effect Canadian public and academic life.
THOMAS M. PRYMAK, PhD., is a Research Associate with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies,
Departments of History and Political Science, University of Toronto. He has taught history at
several different Canadian universities and is the author of numerous publications in the field.
His most recent book is titled Gathering a Heritage: Ukrainian, Slavonic, and Ethnic Canada and
the USA (University of Toronto Press, 2015).