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-Mayakovsky, "A Tribute to Ukraine"
So-called Surzyk-a mixed Ukrainian-Russian (or Russian-Ukrainian) speech that is characteristic of certain social strata of the population in eastern and central Ukraine and southern Russia-has drawn to itself the intense, and not always benign, attention of scholars and the general public in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet imperial space, a process that gave rise to new and rapidly developing sociolinguistic configurations. As a result, writings about Surzyk have proliferated in recent years. Unfortunately, a majority of the works on the subject treat it as a "lowly" phenomenon, an attitude that implies a monolithic hierarchical system of sociocultural values. Burdened with the low prestige and negative connotation that are habitually attached to it, Surzyk appears as a secondary linguistic product-a grotesque distortion of both Ukrainian and Russian committed by speakers of poor education and bad taste. One can understand and even sympathize with the reasons behind this sociopolitical attitude, particularly as it arises in a newly independent Ukraine, where it reflects concerns about the integrity and security of Ukrainian as a national language. At the same time, a linguist should never forget that as far as linguistic studies are concerned, there are not and should not be such things as "bad" or "illegitimate" languages. One can agree that an attempt to promote the use of Surzyk in the name of social fairness would be ill-advised; in this respect, the case of Surzyk resembles that of Ebonics. But to draw this parallel also means that as an object of study Surzyk, similarly to Ebonics, represents a phenomenon in its own right that deserves unconstrained and unbiased scholarly attention. Michael Flier (1998) should be given full credit for reminding us about the existence of the linguistic aspect of the subject, alongside its sociopolitical aspect. In Flier's study, the much-despised and derided surzyk turns into Surzyk-a given fact of language that can be observed in everyday speech practices of a large segment of population of eastern and central Ukraine (as well as, one can add, of southern Russia). Recently, there have also appeared a few descriptive studies of Surzyk that contribute to our so far rather scant factual knowledge of the subject. In one...