Zakarpattia Regional Council at a session on Friday decided to grant Hungarian, Romanian and Rusyn languages the regional status, the Western Information Corporation (ZIK) online newspaper has reported.
“Seventy-eight deputies of Zakarpattia Regional Council voted for the decision proposing that local government agencies take measures to implement the provisions of the law of Ukraine on the principles of state language policy. The decision states that Hungarian, Rusyn and Romanian are regional languages on the territory of administrative-territorial units (villages, towns and cities) in Zakarpattia region,” reads the report.
Head of Zakarpattia Regional Council Ivan Baloha described the decision as politically motivated and advised his colleagues to refrain from adopting it.
The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, passed the bill on the principles of the state language policy initiated by the Regions Party on July 3, 2012.
On August 8, 2012 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych signed the bill into law and instructed the Cabinet of Ministers to form a working group for the development of proposals to improve language legislation in Ukraine.
The law took effect on August 10. According to it, a language may be provided with the status of a regional language if the percentage of people considering it their native language exceeds 10% of the total population of the region.
Odesa regional and city councils, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhia, Sevastopol, Dnipropetrovsk, and Luhansk city councils, Krasny Luch Town Council (Luhansk region), Zaporizhia, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regional councils have declared Russian a regional language on their territories.
Hungarian was also declared a regional language in Berehove (Zakarpattia region) and in Berehove district. Moldovan was declared a regional language in Tarasivtsi in Chernivtsi region.
Romanian was declared a regional language in the village of Bila Tserkva (Biserica Alba in Romanian) in Rakhiv district, Zakarpattia region.
