page_title: Surzhyk
section_title: Prevalence
hierarchical_section_title: Surzhyk / Prevalence
caption_attribution_description: The Usage of the Surzhyk, a map with the Russian legenda
context_page_description: Surzhyk refers to a range of mixed sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands. There is no unifying set of characteristics; the term is used for "norm-breaking, non-obedience to or non-awareness of the rules of the Ukrainian and Russian standard languages". It originates from the transition from one language to the other through "false friends": words that sound similar in both languages, but carry different meanings.
  Surzhyk is a Ukrainian word for a "macaronic language" so that, in Ukrainian language it could refer to any mixed language, not necessarily including Ukrainian or Russian. When used by non-ukrainian speaking people of Ukraine the word most commonly used to refer to a mix of Ukrainian with another language, not necessarily Russian. When used in Russia the word almost always specifically refers to a Ukrainian-Russian language mix.
context_section_description: According to data presented by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2003, 11% to 18% of the people of Ukraine were found to communicate in Surzhyk. Specifically, in western Ukraine, Surzhyk is spoken by 2.5% of the population, while in the south, it is spoken by over 12.4% of the population. In the east, 9.6% of the population speaks Surzhyk. As Western Ukraine has a higher ratio of Ukrainian speakers to Russian speakers than the rest of Ukraine, the lesser proportion of Surzhyk speakers compared with the east and south is understandable.
  One problem in analysing the linguistic status of Ukraine is that there is a tendency for code-mixing errors to exist across the entire spectrum of languages. In other words, those who identify themselves as Russian-speaking or Ukrainian-speaking can often be found blending the two languages to some degree. Only a few of these individuals were found to acknowledge the incorrectness of the use of either or both languages, or the fact that they were actually blending Russian and Ukrainian in their speech at all.
caption: Prevalence of Surzhyk in the regions of Ukraine. Data by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2003.[2]
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