UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN AND RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN CODE MIXING

The Ukraine is a multilingual state, with a predominantly bilingual constellation - Ukrainian and Russian. These two structurally closely related languages function as donor languages for a mixed code called Surzhyk. The specific point with the Ukrainian-Russian mixed code is that it may exist in two variants, reflecting the history of the country. Prototype Surzhyk stems from the times of Russian political and social dominance in the Ukraine: From the 1860-ies in Tsarist times and from the 1930-ies in Soviet times people adapted themselves to a Russian- speaking environment. Though quite variable, a certain stabilisation of this mixed code is observed, since adults started to speak Old Surzhyk between themselves and with their children in informal communication over several generations. The second variant of mixed code, here called Neo-Surzhyk, is of younger origin. It evolved with people who used to practise mainly Russian, but - due to the Ukrainian language politics after 1990 - had at least partially to turn to Ukrainian. Neo-Surzhyk thus has a Russian base and is expected to occur most probably along with Old Surzhyk - in the South of the Ukraine (and in the East, now inaccessible for systematic research). The central research question of our project with a general contact-linguistic dimension is the following: Is there a clear differentiation between two mixed codes based on the same two closely related donor languages? Or is there a gradual transition between groups of speakers with different sociodemographic backgrounds? The methodological approach of the project consists in a corpus linguistic description, combined with analytical methods of quantitative variationist sociolinguistics, correlated with sociodemographic data. In addition to that, in-depth interviews on individual Sprachbiographien (linguistic biographies) will be conducted and analysed qualitatively, in order to correlate quantitative contact-linguistic findings with qualitative data.

The project covers data from the period from the end of 2019 to the end of 2021, i.e. the period immediately preceding Russia's full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine. At that time, southern Ukraine was a essentially a bilingual region: Ukrainian and Russian were the most widely spoken languages. These two structurally closely related languages historically functioned as donor languages for a third widespread mixed oral code called 'Suržyk'. According to the project's research hypothesis of the project, Suržyk can theoretically take on two variants that reflect the country's history: (a) the prototypical 'Old Suržyk' from the period of political and social dominance of Russian in Ukraine since the 1860s of the Tsarist era and from the 1930s of the Soviet era, when native Ukrainian-speaking rural-urban migrants adapted to the Russian-speaking environment ; (b) the oral code we called 'Neo-Suržyk', which developed among speakers who were accustomed to using mainly Russian since childhood but who had to turn at least partially to Ukrainian due to the Ukrainian language policy since 1990. The central research question of the project with its innovative contact-linguistic dimension was the following: Is there a clear distinction between two mixed codes based on the same two closely related donor languages? Or is there a gradual transition between groups of speakers with different sociodemographic and biographical backgrounds? The results so far suggest the latter, i.e. that, with a certain degree of variability, Suržyk is a consistent, grammatically and lexically stabilised mixed Ukrainian-Russian oral code used by its speakers in informal communication situations. The methodological approach of the project consisted of a corpus linguistic description of spoken language data collected in Ukraine between the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2021 (about 400,000 word forms), combined with analytical methods of quantitative variationist sociolinguistics (Oldenburg research group), and a discourse-analytical approach to data from interviews with speakers of Suržyk concerning their so-called language biographies and linguistic repertoires (Klagenfurt research group). The quantitative and qualitative data were correlated with sociodemographic data. The project work and its results were presented and discussed at conferences, in the course of university teaching, in scientific publications, and in presentations for a wider public. The data reflect the so-called linguistic landscape of Ukraine prior to the 'turning point' of 24 February 2022 and - in addition to the linguistic perspective presented here - also provide documentation for further language policy studies, including new dimensions due to recent migration flows and language policy implications as a result of the aggression of Russia against Ukraine.