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this thesis, the Russian scholars have given to the formation of this language almost the same historic explanations as those which we have given to the subject of Ukrainian ethnic development.
"From even the beginning of history the general Russian language had its dialectic differences which allowed for the supposition that the Russian people were divided into three groups: the Northern Group, the Centre Group, and the Southern Group. The documents of the South in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as is proved by the Academician, Sobolievsky, already showed the characteristic traits of the language of the Little Russians. One can say with certainty that the dialect of the South (Ukrainian) is quite distinguished from the dialects of the Centre and the North, even before the pre-Tartar period. This distinction did not cease by the political union of the Slavs of the East in the tenth and eleventh centuries (the Duchy of Kiev). On the contrary, the political dispersion of these territories which took place later, the organisation of a political centre near to Moscow, the downfall of Kiev towards the end of the twelfth century, all favoured the separation of the South, which the arrival of the Tartars achieved. In the Lithuanian-Russian State (which comprised many Ukrainian lands), the tribes of the South met the tribes of the Centre, who, later on, formed the White Russians. It is only by the colonisation, which did not occur until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the Great Russians and the Little Russians drew together in the basins of the rivers Seime, Donetz and Don. Thus it is, that historical conditions have contributed to the complete isolation of South-West Russia (Ukraine) and Great Russia, and thus it is, that the differences between the languages of the Great Russians and the Little Russians are explained. The historical life of these races has not created a common language; on the contrary, it has deepened the dialectic differences which one sees at their entrance in history, among the ancestors of the Little Russians on one side
