Religious texts were dominated by the Ukrainian variant of Church Slavonic (the so-called Meletian, after the reforms Meletius Smotrytsky).
[4] The significant degree of Polonization of the Ukrainian elites led to the fact that Polish was also used in other areas, and in the 17th century it became the main language of religious polemics.
[7] At the end of the 18th century Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769–1838) initiated the process of formation of the modern literary Ukrainian language, based on south-eastern dialects and prosta mova.
The unsuccessful rebellion of Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1708–1709), who attempted to throw off Russian supremacy, can be taken as the starting moment.
However, due to its inferior status (the official language was first German, then Polish, the Ukrainian community lacked a Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia) its development was hampered.