Are Hutsuls truly Rusyns?

[Vasic]

Do you think Hutsuls are a subset of the greater Rusyn culture? These two guys disagree in this video.

[Peterski]

[Nurzat]

...

laughed hard on this one, thanks for posting it. I assume this is WW1 because after that 90% of the Hutsul land (the one in Ukraine now) was part of Poland in the interbellum, until WW2. probably they ironize the fact that Poles didn't know who the fuck are these Hutsuls that they then had in their country. btw Hutsuls lived along with Poles long before, as in all Galicia the towns had heavy Polish population while the surrounding villages were Ruthenian, including in Hutsulistan. it is common that Hutsuls say they have a Polish grandma or so, haha, it happens in my family as well, although I don't know if it's true, though my dad does speak some Polish, I think it's because of similarity of language only that he catched some Polish, not from family, though having some Polish roots seems to be something to brag with in my region (among the Hutsuls in Romania). grandma's mom had a surname that's common to Poles, Ukrainians and Slovaks, so who knows. the rest of the surnames in the family are Ukrainian. I'd love to learn a bit of Polish myself, I understand some of it in writing due to similarity of words origin but in listening it's hard, probably until you listen enough and tune in with the phonetic deviation from Ruthenian speech, because the base is the same.

гуцуў

[Nurzat]

Do you think Hutsuls are a subset of the greater Rusyn culture? These two guys disagree in this video.

Rusyns who speak an extremely Western variant of it are hard to understand because of many original words they use, we have them in Romania as well, a good friend of mine is one, while I am from the Hutsul side and we speak with much less original words, it's basically standard Ukrainian but only with a very local pronunciation, since we have the most archaic Ruthenian speech, with preserved phonetical features of Old East Slavic, thus all those palatalized consonants. other than that I'd say Hutsul is much closer to Ukrainian standard than Rusyn, by the varieties spoken in Romania (Maramuresh, Bukovina and Moldova regions, by the border with Ukraine).

I will share an opinion once I listen the podcast as well, I wanted to first say what I know beforehand, from own experience.

[Aspirin]

Yes. They are the same with Boykos and Lemkos, and are very similar culturally and genetically.

[Nurzat]

Yes. They are the same with Boykos and Lemkos, and are very similar culturally and genetically.

well I am a Hutsul (genetically half but raised in the community, so culturally one) and I find it harder to answer because our communities are quite disconnected, however overall I'd say there's an invisible thread linking all Carpathian Ruthenian-speaking communities, although they are entitled to use different denominations to name themselves, as they do (Rusyns, Lemkos, Boykos, Hutsuls, some would even include Gorals), since they are different between themselves inside the broader common spectrum. national identity at state/country level is something very new to some of these communities and there's a lot of variation of how different people in the community relate to it: in Romania maybe 10% of Hutsuls and Rusyns declare themselves Ukrainian in the census, the rest declare themselves Romanian not because they consider themselves Romanian ethnically but because they don't feel a strong enough link to Ukraine as a state and nation, I'd say mostly seeing Ukrainians as post-Soviet mostly-Russian-speaking/Russified, close enough to us but just different, somehow the same as most Moldovans in Romania feel about Moldovans in the Rep. of Moldova, though in the RM they still speak mostly Romanian (Moldovan dialect), while in Ukraine they mostly speak Russian instead. (and on this topic I am on a minority that feels very close to RM people maybe because of being in touch with East Slavic as well, though not with the Soviet social culture, only in what overlaps other post-communist Eastern Bloc cultures, and because on my mom's side they speak an archaic and well-preserved variant of Moldovan similar to RM less the recent Russisms).

also the nationalism in Ukraine around the situation with Russia after 2008 is scaring away many Ukranian ethnics in Romania, that shy away of openly saying they're from a Ukrainian-speaking village, because there's so much noise around anything "Ukrainian" for a while now.

all these Ruthenian-speaking communities of various dialects of Western Ukraine, the proper Ukraine, actually, we could say, West of river Zbruch, although they are not Russified as Eastern Ukrainians, they are still often confused about identity, and looking at how things changed politically and demographically until recently in the area, it's understandable (they've been part of Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia and Romania in the last century alone).

what I can say for my local community is that everyone is aware we're East Slavic, but there's such a diversity of how they prefer to identify (not at the census, but when they speak about it): most would say they are Hutsul, many would say they are Rusnak (my dad's family side uses this word), some would say they are Ukrainian, a few would even say they are Russian, not in the Russian Federation way but pointing at Old Russians/common Russian or Ruthenian identity including all East Slavs, and using Ruthenian in Romanian often enough ("ruteni"). Rusyn is not used at all as a word to identify among Hutsuls in Suchava county, I don't know about the Ukrainians in Maramuresh county.