#surzhyk

^^^ from Steve Rosenberg of the BBC.

One of the few things Russian officials are good for is their unintentionally hilarious irony.

As far as popularity of languages goes... 

Mother Tongue: The Story of a Ukrainian Language Convert How one Ukrainian woman made the switch from her native Russian tongue to Ukrainian 

My mother tongue tastes like ashes. Things scorched by enemy fire, then soaked with rain, touched with rot, smelling of death. I felt the taste of my mother tongue most acutely while driving through Borodianka, Bucha, and Irpin two months after these Ukrainian towns in the Kyiv region were liberated by the Ukrainian army from the Russians’ “brotherly” embrace.

Russian is my mother tongue and liberation means ripping it out of my throat.

[ ... ]

Today, I savor the cacophony of Ukrainian proper, Ukrainian broken like my mother’s, and the hybridized form of Ukrainian-Russian called “surzhyk” when I’m walking down the streets in Kyiv and Lviv. The mass displacement caused by Russia‘s war has made Ukrainians from all parts of the country listen to each other and pick up new linguistic tricks. It is by pronouncing the Ukrainian word for a loaf of bread, “palianytsia,” that a friend is now distinguished from a foe at the military checkpoints around the country. Perfectly pronounced by Russophone Ukrainians, the combination of vowels and consonants makes Russians choke on the word connoting hospitality in the country they invaded.

There are reasons to believe the eastern Ukrainians most immediately affected by the war will choose to disentangle themselves from the invaders’ language, regardless of the difficulty. With the emptiness and openness of the Ukrainian steppe in the east comes the nomadic aspect of the easterner’s identity and the freedom to reinvent oneself. Maik Yohansen comes to mind, alongside Olena Stiazhkina and Volodymyr Rafeienko, contemporary writers who became linguistic converts to Ukrainian after Russia occupied their native city of Donetsk. For decades, Ukrainian identity in the east has been not a default setting but a choice, often made against the grain of one’s upbringing. Today, this choice is existential. Even those Ukrainians who are still unable to sever the linguistic cord which ties them to the enemy are unwilling to pass the Russian language to their children. The next generation will speak Ukrainian across the country.

Go ahead and learn a handful of Ukrainian words. The first thing you’ll notice is that the Ukrainian words for YES and NO are not the same as the Russian words.

Is Surzhyk a language? We disagreed on that with poet and writer Serhiy Zhadan when he visited UT–Austin on the 20th of April. He maintained that Surzhyk is a “schizophrenic” way of speaking which produces warped identities. I claim that Surzhyk is a language in its own right, politically unrecognized yet as a language, dismissed by tone-deaf “intellectuals” and perceived as a bastardized product of colonial culture.

My grandmother’s native language was the language which she called Ukrainian, and her youngest (Russian-speaking) children called “Surzhyk.” Regardless of how one calls her language, that was the clearest, deepest, and most poetic language I heard, and her identity was beautiful in all its aspects.