Ucranianos em Cascavel: a história, a religião e a língua

Abstract

This study is made of a sociolinguistic research, whose focus of analysis are the history, religion and the language of descendants of Ukrainian immigrants who live in Cascavel City, western Paraná. In this ethnic and linguistic context, the religious culture is outstanding, through the Ukrainian Catholic Greek Church which, because of its tradition has as a mark the Ukrainian Byzantine Rite. Therefore the community has a bilingual reality, in which the speakers make use of Ukrainian and Portuguese according to their speech necessities. The aim of this paper was to analyze the causative factors of situational bilinguism and the teaching of Ukrainian Language through an ethnographic research as well as checking the occurrence of stigma on the vernacular ethnic mother language, the conditions and the reasons that cause the preservation and maintenance of the language and the culture that is present in this group. For that, it was researched the historical aspects that are related to the arrival of this ethnic group in Brazil, as well as in Paraná, and mainly in Cascavel. Besides, it was observed the relevant aspects in relation to the history of the Roman Apostolic Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, because they contributed to the arousing of this different way of being a Church. The Ukrainian symbolic imaginary is also elucidated, because it contributes to the perpetuation and the maintenance of symbolic/cultural aspects of the ethnical identity of this group. The study evidenced that the religion is a strong alley in the maintenance and the preservation of the language, as well as in the symbolic imaginary of this ethnic group, by presenting rites which are still performed in the original language. This way, it is through the language that the ethnical and cultural identities are maintained, contributing to lessen the stigma at the same time. In addition, it is possible to prove that the search for the formal learning of the Ukrainian language by adults is a way to interact with the members of the community in order to reconstitute the past to understand the present in a better way. Therefore, the memory, the history and the past of struggle and resistance of this ethnical group, also collaborated to the maintenance, because what was a reason for humiliation in the past, nowadays has become a reason to be proud. This way, the families and the church are preponderant maintaining and preserving the Ukrainian language and culture. It is also possible to affirm that the identity, the culture and the language constitute the power movement of the community. So, it is impossible to analyze them separately, in the same way that it is not imaginable people being dissociated of these elements which compose them. For the Ukrainian people, the religion is the foundation of this triad, because it is what brings them together.