The Rusyn language spoken in the Pannonian plain, or more conretely in north-western Serbia and eastern Croatia (therefore also called Yugoslavo-Rusyn, Vojvodina-Rusyn or Bačka-Rusyn) is closer to West Slavic languages, to Slovak in particular. Oddly enough, it is considered a Ukrainian dialect by Ukrainians and a Slovak dialect by Slovaks, while in fact it should probably be called a microlanguage based on Eastern Slovak dialects with an East Slavic superstratum (namely, Russian Church Slavonic, Russian and [Old] Ruthenian). This mixture is due to the fact that these Rusyns emigrated to Bačka from Eastern Slovakia around the middle of the 19th century, but are Greek Catholics and therefore have close linguistic and cultural ties with Ukraine. Rusyn is one of the official languages of the Serbian Autonomous Province of Vojvodina.
Rusyns themselves call their language (бачваньска) руска бешеда or (бачваньски) руски язик. Their cultural centre is Ruski Kerestur (Руски Керестур, Serbian Krstur). Although the number of Pannonian Rusyns is much lower than that of the Carpathian Rusyns (23,286 according to the Yugoslavian census of 1981), they were lucky to live in a multinational state that granted them certain minority rights as early as the 1970s, so that there is a completely Rusyn grammar-school in Ruski Kerestur (with some 250 schoolbooks printed so far for this school and elementary schools), a professorial chair for Rusyn studies at Novi Sad University, and regular television and radio programmes in Rusyn.
The language has been codified by Mikola Kočiš (Микола Кочиш) in Правопис руского язика ('Orthography of Rusyn', 1971) and Ґраматика руского язика ('Grammar of Rusyn', 1974) and is written with Cyrillic letters.
