The Contribution of Representatives of Literature to the Formation of the Ukrainian Literary Language (the Second Half of the 18th – the First Half of the 19th Century)

The purpose of the article is to find out the contribution of writers to the formation of the Ukrainian literary language in the second half of the 18th – the first half of the 19th century. The research methodology was based on the use of the activity approach to language as a phenomenon of culture, as well as the principle of historicism and systematicity in the study of the contribution of literature representatives to the formation of the Ukrainian literary language in a certain time interval. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the cultural analysis of the contribution of outstanding figures of Ukrainian culture to the development of the Ukrainian literary language. It is noted that the new Ukrainian language, which incorporates the signs of conversational-household and folklore-song languages, begins to form in the second half of the 18th century. The scientific novelty of the work The Ukrainian literary language was significantly influenced by the annexation of a part of the Ukrainian lands by Russia, as a result of which the birth of the new people-based Ukrainian literary language took place in the conditions of territorial disunity. An expressive testimony to the creation of the new Ukrainian literature is the work of Ivan Kotliarevskyi, who not only reproduced the richness of the colloquial language and drew attention to the artistic and aesthetic value of the Ukrainian language culture, but restored the Ukrainian literary language in the printed work. Using P. I. Kotliarevskyi’s creative methods, P. P. Hulak-Artemovskyi laid the foundation for the Ukrainian prose language, enriching it with new genres – epistles, romantic ballads, fables, and poem chants of psalms. The linguistic activity of Ukrainian romantics of the first half of the 19th century (P. A. Kulish, T. G. Shevchenko, N. I. Kostomarov, etc.), who with their creativity embraced all the literary genres existing at that time, is characterized by the desire to synthesize in Ukrainian literary language all the words of the folk language, in particular the eastern and western ones. So in the first half of the 19th century literature was already created, the basis of which was the folk language. Conclusions. In the second half of the 18th century there were qualitative changes in the Ukrainian literary language process, due to a number of factors that significantly determined the nature of the language-forming activity of Ukrainian figures, the nature of the entire language process and the stages of its development.