A Ukrainian mongrel

By Vijai Maheshwari

Welcome to Surzhyk, the lingua franca of a people who now shun Russian.

KIEV — The convenience store opposite my apartment in this city’s historic center is run by people from western Ukraine who make no secret of their disdain for the Russian language. When I order my cigarettes or beer in Russian, they’re churlish, and often claim not to have any change for my large bills. When I throw in a few words of Ukrainian, however, a smile lights up their faces, and they even offer to bag my purchases for me.
What I didn’t realize until recently is that my attempts to curry linguistic favor has its own name, whose history goes back centuries. A good quarter of Ukraine’s 40 million-strong population speaks Surzhyk, a mash of Russian and Ukrainian that came into vogue during the Russification of the region in the late 18th century. As Russian became the lingua franca of the industrialized cities in Ukraine’s heartland, peasants began mixing Russian words into their speech to communicate with city-dwellers — and a form of Ukrainian creole was born.

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“The word ‘Surzhyk’ originally meant flour made from low-quality grains,” says Larissa Masenko, a linguistics professor at the prestigious Kyiv-Mohyla University. Masenko, who has even written a book about the Surzhyk language, emphasizes that the “language developed in the Ukrainian-speaking villages and small towns, where speakers lacked a formal education.” Even today, she says, the language is still spoken in many of the towns surrounding Kiev, including Borispol, home to the city’s international airport.
Masenko, who is strongly pro-Ukrainian, believes that the mongrel language would have died a natural death had there been more pro-Ukrainian politics in the post-communist era. However, far from fading away, the creole language is experiencing a revival in the wake of the revanche of the Ukrainian language in the post-revolutionary era. As more Russian speakers from the cities attempt to speak Ukrainian to fit in with the zeitgeist, they unwittingly end up speaking a reverse form of Surzhyk.
“It’s very frustrating,” says Bogdan Melnik, who works for a travel agency in Kiev. “We used to speak Russian in the office, but now our boss has decided that we must speak Ukrainian. The result is that many of us, who come from Russian-speaking homes, end up speaking Surzhyk.”
A recent article in Ukraine’s leading paper, Korrespondent, even alleged that the vast majority of Ukrainians now speak Surzhyk. It even claimed that with so many Ukrainians mixing the two languages, only around 20 percent of the population now speaks either “pure” Ukrainian or “pure” Russian.

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While the paper’s opinions are open to debate, a wander around Kiev on a busy day supports their eye-catching claims. Kiev was until recently a Russian-language city, where most residents spoke Russian, and Ukrainian was even frowned upon. Now I rarely hear pure Russian; instead, even Russian-speakers pepper their dialogue with Ukrainian words. A good friend of mine, who once worked for the former President Victor Yanukovych, now butchers his beautiful Russian with badly pronounced Ukrainian words in an attempt to appear patriotic.
This daily mishmash of the two languages reminds me of being in a large office in Delhi or Mumbai, where workers communicate in “Hinglish,” a mix of Hindi and English.
Like Hinglish, Surzhyk is a funny-sounding language that’s been fodder for comics, even during the Soviet era. The Soviets were quick to exploit the rough-hewn sounds of Surzhyk to discredit the Ukrainian language in general. The hugely popular communist-era comedy from the 1950s and 60s, Tarapunka and Shtepsel — a version of Laurel and Hardy — had the intelligent Russian-speaking Shtepsel constantly outwitting his primitive Surzhyk-speaking partner Tarapunka.
More recently, Verka Serduchka, a flamboyant drag queen who won second place in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007, hosted the popular “SV-show” in the early 2000s, where he spoke Surzhyk with various visiting celebrities. He even produced hit songs in the Surzhyk language, taking it from low-brow culture into the realm of high-brow public discourse. Many common Ukrainians loved Serduchka’s use of Surzhyk, seeing him as a kindred sprit who was accessible and understandable.
Their fondness for Serduchka is no accident: Many Surzhyk speakers from the villages and small towns of Ukraine were discriminated against during the post-Soviet era. My girlfriend’s mother, who has spoken Surzhyk from her childhood, recalls being snapped at when she asked for directions in Kiev a few years ago. “Speak proper Russian, lady, if you want to be understood,” admonished the tram conductor. Conversely, natives of Lvov, Ukraine’s cultural capital, labeled her a “Moskal” (a derogatory Ukrainian word for Russians) upon hearing her Russian-sounding Surzhyk.
Serduchka, who became a poster-boy for the Surzhyk language, had his show canceled after a backlash over the popularization of the language. Popular handbooks like “Let’s Avoid Russianisms in the Ukrainian Language! A brief dictionary of Anti-Surzhyk for everyone who wants their Ukrainian language not to resemble the language of Verka Serduchka!” called for the use of a “purer” Ukrainian language unsullied by Russian.
Though other popular TV shows like Kvartal 95 (Quarter 95) still occasionally poke fun at Surzhyk, they are now going against the grain of contemporary Ukrainian culture. With the rise in patriotism since the revolution, and the elevation of the Ukrainian language to the primary tongue of the country, it’s not PC anymore to joke about its creole versions. The memories of the Soviet attempt to denigrate the Ukrainian language through Surzhyk still run deep. Instead, everyone’s brushing up on their Ukrainian, and trying to speak like those in western Ukraine, whose speech is hailed as the “gold standard.”

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There are now fewer than a dozen Russian-language schools left in Kiev, many having been closed down after the revolution. Masenko, the linguistics professor, believes that within a generation most Ukrainians will only speak Russian as a second language.
“With the current pro-Ukrainian politics, the Russian language will cease to be part of public discourse in 20 years,” she predicts.
However, with a majority of Kiev’s residents still speaking Russian at home — as does Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko — this paradigm shift toward the Ukrainian language is not going to be without surprises. As Russian speakers switch to speaking Ukrainian, they are bound to mash up the language, and introduce their own neologisms. A converse form of Surzhyk — Russian speech mixed with Ukrainian words — is certain to develop in the meantime. You can already hear this post-revolutionary idiom in the cafes of Kiev these days.
It’s possible that Ukraine might yet embrace its bilingual identity, and Russian speakers might not feel compelled to switch over to speaking Ukrainian. But don’t bet on it. Expect Surzhyk to remain the unofficial lingua franca of Ukraine for at least another generation.