Did your grandmother sing you lullabies and folk songs when you were a child? Tell you stories? Did you admire her speech, asking what certain words meant?

Did she describe how people in her village sang while coming back from the fields, how girls and boys danced hopak and horlytsia at evening gatherings, how they led the “koza” or staged a Christmas “vertep,” and how they played games during the spring singing season? All of this is the wealth of folk speech, song, and culture.

Preserve this wealth and pass it to your children. Start by recording a video of a song/dance/musical piece/story. Perform it exactly as you see it in the folklore resources, we have collected on our website. You may choose a video from your own or another region - the main thing is that it speaks to you, and that you reproduce it as precisely as possible.

Our jury - qualified folklorists and dialectologists - will evaluate your performance. If you present a truly accurate, high-quality reproduction of folk tradition, we will be glad to award you 3,000 hryvnias. The performance should be as close to the original as possible - don’t be afraid of the local accent or manner of singing or speaking. Those are exactly what need to be preserved and passed on.

The program is intended for participants up to 35 years old. If your video is selected, you will need to fill out a form with your name or the name of one of your parents or guardians, who will be the recipient of the funds.

We are sincerely grateful for the support of the Temerty Family Foundation and the Canada-Ukraine Foundation.

Here is an example of a video that fully meets the contest requirements. Anna Khrystenko managed to reproduce all the details of the Poltava–Kaniv dialect (using a carol from Drabiv district, Cherkasy region) in both speech and singing. You do not need to be as skillful a singer as Anna - don’t worry, we are not evaluating stage skills or pitch. We want to hear how you reproduced all the dialect features from the video you chose on Folklore Video Resources page (or from another source of folk creativity). These features are no longer present in young people’s everyday speech, and we want youth to rediscover the beauty of their grandparents’ language and start speaking it again.