Surzhyk
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Surzhyk (Ukrainian: суржик, originally meaning ‘flour or bread made from mixed grains’, e.g., wheat with rye), is currently the mixed language or sociolect used by a considerable part of the population of Ukraine. It is a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian languages in which commonly Russian vocabulary is combined with Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation.
The vocabulary usage of either of the languages varies greatly with location, or sometimes even from person to person, depending on the level of education, personal experiences, 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 population uses the 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.
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.
There are similar phenomena of language mixture around the globe. In Belarus, the mixture of Belarusian and Russian is called Trasianka. In Canada province of New Brunswick a French and English languages mixing phenomenon is called Chiac.
Canadian Ukrainian, which is a dialect of Ukrainian language spoken by the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, is another illustration of language mixture. It is mostly based on the Galician dialect spoken at the turn of the 19th-20th century as many Ukrainian emigrants to Canada came from Galicia and Bukovina.
[edit] Surzhyk as an ethnopolitical issue
Much of the Ukrainian speaking population actually speaks one of the many regional dialects of the language. The mixture with Russian is especially widespread in the east and south of the country, though frowned upon by the western population. The local dialects in Western Ukraine have elements of the Polish language.
In Soviet times the usage of Ukrainian was gradually decreasing, particularly at times where 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 the formal Ukrainian language.
Since 1991, Ukrainian has become the official language of Ukraine. All school exams are the same across the country.
[edit] 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)
[edit] See also
- 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 - a pidgin language that compines elements of Russian and Norwegian
- Russification - the policy 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
