The categories of "our own" and "foreign" in the language and culture of Czech repatriates from the Ukraine.

In 1990,members of Czech communities in the Ukraine initiated talks with Václav Havel,the President of the Czech Republic,as well as with the Czechoslovak government in order to request that they and their families be given the opportunity to resettle in Czechoslovakia.Between 1991--1993,the Czechoslovak and subsequently the Czech government assisted 1811 people from the Ukraine and Belorussia to move to regions in the present Czech Republic.The repatriation project was focused on people from the areas hit by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.These people found a new home in their ancestors' country and rejoined the Czech--speaking community.Their current position in the original homeland combines the features of "our own" and "foreign" people. The present article examines the ethnic awareness of these Czech repatriates from the Ukraine,their linguistic situation,and their linguistic competence.The research was executed in the form of interviews with individual respondents.The principal respondent,Mr.Ornst,served,in fact,as a spokesperson for the group that resettled from Mala Zubovshtina to Butoves.His discourse is subjected to a detailed analysis.The author seeks to establish a relation between the interviews,performed both with Mr.Ornst and with other respondents,and Mr.Ornst's two written narratives.In them,he formulated his views concerning the lifestyle of the Czech minority abroad and the specific state of the Czech language as the group had brought it back to the Czech lands after more than one hundred years of living abroad.The methodology of the study is based on discussing both the advantages and limitations of the use of narrative as a key for understanding ethnic awareness and linguistic competence of people from the Czech colonies in the Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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