Okannia and akannia in Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech (“surzhyk”) Ukrainian language policy in the 1920s and after 1991: Development stages and present trends

Abstract

The Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech (URMS), also known as “surzhyk”, is a widespread phenomenon in central areas of Ukraine. Linguistic studies still lack empirical research on the variation of phonic characteristics of URMS and on its connection with the social characteristics of its speakers. Based on a corpus of spoken speech of this non-standard variety with around 340,000-word tokens taken from informal family conversations and open interviews, this article examines the variation in Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech between two prominent phonic features of Ukrainian and Russian — the variation of unstressed /ɔ/ between Ukrainian okannia and Russian akannia. The results confirm that okannia strongly dominates in unstressed vocalism of URMS thus largely corresponding to the standard Ukrainian pattern and differen tiating it from Russian. A Generalized Linear Mixed Model shows that the variation between okannia and akannia is influenced by complex dialectal and sociolinguistic differences in the Ukrainian language landscape, sociodemographic characteristics of the speakers, e.g., age and gender, and the speech situation. There are evident correlations between the phonic variation and the lexicalmorpho lo gical affinity of the word form, i.e., whether the word form on the lexical-morpho logical level coin cides with either standard Ukrainian or Russian. The findings make it clear that one-dimensional attempts to clarify language variation in Ukraine are bound to fail. Keywords: Ukrainian-Russian language contact, dialect contact, language variation, îkannia, akannia