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 fifteen to twenty percent of the population of Ukraine. It is a mixture of Ukrainian substratum with Russian superstratum. Normally 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 setting, origin of his 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 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 makes 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 repertoir of the pop-star Verka Serdyuchka.

In Belarus, there is a similar phenomenon called Trasianka, which combines Belarusian with Russian.

[edit] Surzhyk as an ethnopolitical issue

Much of the Ukrainian speaking population actually speaks one of the many forms of Surzhyk. The Russian mix is especially widespread in the east and south of the country, though frowned upon by the western population, which ironically does not speak "standard" Ukrainian either (the classic literary Ukrainian is the closest to the dialect spoken in central Ukraine, particularly in the Poltava area). 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 command of the Russian than of the Ukrainian language.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the definition of canonical Ukrainian became somewhat of a controversy, with different regions or scholar groups struggling to establish their versions countrywide. This matter is a hot issue for many Ukrainians and some members of the population display scorn for their fellow countrymen speaking different dialects, which is often mutual. Some universities, colleges, and other educational facilities tend to have a strict semiofficial language policy. Additionally, the dialect spoken by the Ukrainian diaspora, mostly based on the Galician dialect spoken at the turn of the 19th-20th century, is now added to the mix as the cultural exchanges greatly intensified (also see Canadian Ukrainian).