George Yurii Shevelov (name at birth German: George Yurii Schneider, Ukrainian: Юрій Володимирович Шнайдер, romanized: Yurii Volodymyrovych Shnaider) also known by his numerous literary pseudonyms Yurii Sherekh, Hryhory Shevchuk, Šerech, Sherekh, Sher; Гр. Ш., Hr. Sh., Ю. Ш., Yu. Sh., etc. (December 17, 1908 – April 12, 2002) was a Ukrainian-American professor, linguist, philologist, essayist, literary historian, and literary critic of German heritage. A longtime professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University, he challenged the prevailing notion of a unified East Slavic language from which Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian later developed, instead proposing that these languages emerged independently from one another.