Language Contact: Morphosyntactic Analysis of Surzhyk Spoken in Central Ukraine

The term ‘surzhyk’ comes from Russian denoting a mixture of wheat and rye flour; adulterated wheat flour (Ushakov 1940). Now Surzhyk is used to denote the Russian-Ukrainian language mixture. The word has a negative connotation and opposes the language mixture with varieties of language perceived as pure, such as the standard variety. According to Bilaniuk (2004), current public discourse associates Surzhyk with parochialism, lack of education, and a low culture. The purpose of this research is to categorize this spoken linguistic variety by examining its morphosyntactic structure, and to identify what elements in the data are indicative of language mixing and what can be attributed to other contact phenomena such as codeswitching and lexical borrowing. Although in public discourse the term Surzhyk is used broadly to indicate anything from occasional borrowing to language mixing, in this paper I will give a more precise characterization of Surzhyk by evaluating its structure with respect to two language classification models: Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 2002) and Auer’s continuum (1999). Since there exist some other Ukrainian dialects not generated by contact with Russian, ethnographers and anthropologists use the term Surzhyk to indicate a language variety in which the grammar of Ukrainian — phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon — contains Russian-influenced elements which are not present in the Standard Ukrainian language (Flier 1998, Bilaniuk 2004). Long coexistence of Ukrainian and Russian and language policies implemented by the Russian Empire and the Soviet government created favorable conditions for development of the mixed language variety. In the second section of the paper I will identify the differences between Russian and Ukrainian that are relevant for the analysis of Surzhyk. In the third part I will highlight previous research done on Surzhyk. In the fourth part I will describe two theoretical models which will be used for the analysis of Surzhyk. In the fifth part of the paper I will introduce the methodology of the research (5.1); detail the analysis of Surzhyk collected in Central Ukraine (5.2) by examining agreement markers (5.2.1), verbal derivational affixes (5.2.2), discourse markers (5.2.3), verbs of motion (5.2.4); and talk about codeswitching versus lexical