Regional variation of Russian language?

correction:
aren't pushovers and resistable to>>aren't pushovers can be resistable to

Didn't quite catch that one, mishka, sorry. Anyway, returning to my original question, can we assume that Russian is uniform because of it being the centralized language of the highly centralized country? And Ukrainian and Belarussian were just dialects that failed to FULLY split away from Russian and evolve into the full-fledged independent languages?

I mean, like Polish for instance is a definitely separate language from Russian, even if those two languages are partly intelligible. But Belarussian and Ukrainian even though they exist as separate languages "on paper", are in fact not as separate from Russian as Polish is. That's a fact. You only need to go to Kiev or Minsk and hear what language is spoken in the streets.

Well, my previous message isn't quite intelligible, to be sure :)
Though, the basic idea that people act according to their instinct which is the struggle for survival, seems to be simple at the first sight. But it's full of contradictions. Why does the small group fight to death for the independence while it's much better to surrender and save life? What is the intention of Nature by that? Is the reason of being different from one nation to another causes that sort of thing? Gregarious feeling and common will? Where's individualism?

As to Polish language, it belongs to the western Slavic lingual group (there are 3 groups of them, if I remember best) and Poland was the part of Russian Empire for relatively little time (as well as Russia was a part of Polish-Lithuanian state once) to influence on each other. Ukranian and Belorussian and Russian are one lingual group. Western Ukranian patter is more like Polish because that territory had been more in touch with the Poles.
The word Ukraine derives from the okraina that means remote area, outskirts and at the times of the Empire (till the 1917) it was called Little Russia (Malorossiya). Belorussia even now means White Russia.
Anyway, I don't think that Belarussian and escpecially Ukranian aren't independent languages. In the countryside you certainly will have to strain your Russian ear to get the speech. Soviet linguists treated them both as independent, too.

China is also highly centralized country, but still the number of Chinese dialects are more than Russian dialects.

>>China is also highly centralized country, but still the number of Chinese dialects are more than Russian dialects.

But they did not create either Cantonese "language" or Shanhainese "language" even though they are as different from Mandarin Chinese as Ukrainian is different from Russian. Even more, I believe. So it confirms the fact that distinction between a separate language and a dalect is a matter of politics, tradition, culture rather than that of linguistic differences. For the Tzarist regime it was convenient to regard Belarussian and Ukrainian as dialects, while after the Communists came to power, the "separate nations" appeared... Politics...

Vytenis wrote:
>>China is also highly centralized country, but still the number of Chinese dialects are more than Russian dialects.
>But they did not create either Cantonese "language" or Shanhainese "language" even though they are as different from Mandarin Chinese as Ukrainian is different from Russian.

Actually, according to SR Ramsey (The Languages of China, Princeton University Press, 1989), that was exactly what the pre-WWII Chinese Communists wanted to do: create six or seven regional standards, whereas the Guomindang wanted to impose Guoyu (i.e., the Beijing standard) to the rest of the country. After WWII and especially after the Chinese Communists broke ties with the Soviet Union, the Soviet-style language model was abandoned in favour of a more centralised one.

the evil nerd

Some excerpts from Ramsey's work here:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/languages-of-china/

the evil nerd