Surzhyk

Surzhyk (Ukrainian: суржик) refers to a range of russified sociolects of Ukrainian used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands. It does not possess any unifying set of characteristics; the term is used for "norm-breaking, non-obedience to or nonawareness of the rules of the Ukrainian and Russian standard languages" .

Name

Surzhyk originally meant a flour or bread made from mixed grains, e.g., wheat with rye.

Overview

The vocabulary mix of each of the languages (Ukrainian and Russian) varies greatly with location, or sometimes even from person to person, depending on the level of education, personal experience, rural or urban residence, origin of interlocutors, etc. The percentage of Russian words and phonetic influences tends to gradually increase in the east and south and around big Russian-speaking cities. It is commonly spoken in most of eastern Ukraine's rural areas, with the exception of the large metropolitan areas of Donetsk, Kharkiv, Luhansk, and especially Crimea, where the majority of the population uses standard Russian. In rural areas of western Ukraine, the language spoken contains fewer Russian elements than in central and eastern Ukraine but has nonetheless been influenced by Russian.

The ancient common origin and more recent divergence of Russian and Ukrainian make it difficult to establish the degree of mixing in a vernacular of this sort.

In literature, Nikolai Gogol used the language extensively in his short story collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.

Surzhyk is often used for comical effect in arts. See, for example, the short plays by Les Poderviansky [1] and the repertoire of the pop-star Verka Serdyuchka. The punk-rock group Braty Hadyukiny sings many of its songs in Surzhyk, often to underscore the rural simplicity of their characters.

Surzhyk as an ethnopolitical issue

In Soviet times the usage of Ukrainian was gradually decreasing, particularly at times when the policies of Russification intensified (1930s and late 1970s to early 1980s) and thus a sizable portion of ethnic Ukrainians have a better knowledge of formal Russian than of formal Ukrainian. Since 1991, however, Ukrainian has become the official language of Ukraine.

See also

• Trasianka - an interlanguage derived from Belarussian and Russian, spoken in Belarus
• West Polesian - a transitional dialect between Ukrainian and Belarusian.
• Balachka - dialects of Kuban Cossacks
• Gøtudanskt - Danish language as spoken in the Faroe Islands
• Portuñol - A mixed language that combines Spanish and Portuguese and is spoken in border areas of various countries (such as Brazil and Uruguay, Spain and Portugal) where the two languages co-exist.
• Jopará - a mixed language spoken in Paraguay which combines Spanish and Guaraní
• Russenorsk - an extinct pidgin language that combined elements of Russian and Norwegian.
• Linguistic Russification - process of introduction of Russian language into non-Russian communities
• Diglossia - a situation of parallel usage of two closely related languages, one of which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and the other one is usually the spoken informally
• Les Podervianskiy

External links

• How Do Ukrainians communicate ?
• Surzhyk and national identity in Ukrainian nationalist language ideology (Niklas Bernsand in Berliner Osteuropa-Info, Vol. 17 - page 41 -, Freie Universität, Berlin)