The City of Dauphin is developing into a very diverse linguistic community with its roots those of Ukrainian immigrants who over many years have developed the city and the rural community. To commemorate this background there have been several caches set up with Ukrainian greetings on the highways leading into Dauphin. Hopefully you will find these greetings of interest and maybe useful.
Over time, the Ukrainian influence in the language of the area has been tempered by the English that is used for most commerce; a simple example is the city’s name, Dauphin. When doing translations and getting assistance from locals, it was found that the older people were using the words “Dauphinoo” and “Dauphiney”, adding an old world prefix to a new world name. You might also find the same phrase said in different ways when people are talking “formally” or “informal”. Another complication we’ll call it, is in spelling, do you spell it the way it is or, in the way it is said (sounded out), examples of this are the word “Bitaemo” which is sometimes spelt as “Veetayemo”; or “Debreh” as “Drobrey” which is how it is pronounced. Being an eastern European language, there is an influence on the language when you find political boundaries super imposed on language boundaries, this gives you Polish Ukrainians and Russian Ukrainians for example. I don’t even want to get into the spelling using the Ukrainian alphabet! These few language examples can be found in the cache titles, if you get your curiosity tweaked, come into Dauphin, you can visit our library, or immerse yourself in our Ukrainian/English bilingual school or visit our midsummer Ukrainian festival.