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# 8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk

**On this page**

1. [1. The dialect continuum](#1-the-dialect-continuum)
2. [2. Regional colour in the standard](#2-regional-colour-in-the-standard)
3. [3. Two centres: the Galician and the Dnieper norm](#3-two-centres-the-galician-and-the-dnieper-norm)
4. [4. The diaspora](#4-the-diaspora)
5. [5. Surzhyk](#5-surzhyk)
6. [6. Songs](#6-songs)
7. [7. Rusyn](#7-rusyn)
8. [8. How Mova handles varieties](#8-how-mova-handles-varieties)
9. [Counts](#counts)
10. [Sources for this chapter](#sources-for-this-chapter)

Ukrainian has one standard language and no national varieties in the sense that English or French has them: there is no second state whose own norm competes with Ukraine's. Its variation is of three other kinds. The first is **regional**: a dialect continuum of three large groups, and, inside the standard, regional colour that a listener recognises at once. The second is **historical**: the standard grew from two centres, Kyiv and Lviv, under two empires, and the diaspora in the West kept the norm of 1928 for decades after it was changed at home. The third is **contact**: surzhyk (суржик, *suržyk*), the mixed Ukrainian–Russian speech of millions of people, which is neither the literary standard nor ordinary colloquial Ukrainian and which recent corpus work describes as a variety with its own regularities.

This chapter describes the dialect groups as deltas over the standard (§1), regional features in the standard (§2), the Galician–Dnieper question and what usage made of it (§3), the diaspora (§4), surzhyk (§5), songs as a register that uses all of these (§6) and Rusyn (§7). §8 says what Mova does with any of it. Register in the wider sense (literary, permitted colloquial, slang, officialese) is in [19. The lexicon: where the words come from, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) §7 and in chapter 37.

The standard behaves in a way that matters for everything below. It is conservative in form: the vocative case, the synthetic future in *-му* and many old words are ordinary in living speech and nobody feels them as quaint ([9. Older Ukrainian and the old forms alive today](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/)). It is modern in its norm: the codified language follows usage, and the orthography of 2019 made variants official that speakers had used for a century, while usage in turn ignored some of the variants it offered (§3.4). This chapter therefore describes norms by what people say and write, and marks where usage is ahead of the codified norm or has gone a different way.

Transliteration follows the scholarly system used throughout this manual ([5. The writing system](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/05-writing-system/)): *h* for г, *g* for ґ, *y* for и, *i* for і, *ji* for ї, *je* for є, *ju* for ю, *ja* for я, *x* for х, *c* for ц, *č* for ч, *š* for ш, *šč* for щ, *ž* for ж, *j* for й, *'* for ь.

## 1. The dialect continuum

### 1.1 The three groups

Ukrainian dialectology divides the dialects into three groups (наріччя, *nariččja*). The scheme goes back to the dialect maps of the 1950s and 1960s and is the frame of the *Atlas of the Ukrainian Language* (AUM); this manual holds no open text of those works. The grouping and the subgroup names in the table are the standard scheme of Ukrainian dialectology and are given here without a library source; the features described below rest on the public-domain grammars and the open papers named with each point.

| group | Ukrainian name | where | subgroups (говори, *hovory*) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **northern** (Polissian) | північне (поліське) наріччя | Polissia: the forest belt along the Belarusian border, from western Volhynia to the Chernihiv and northern Sumy regions | western, central (right-bank) and eastern (left-bank) Polissian |
| **south-western** | південно-західне наріччя | Volhynia, Podillia, Galicia, Bukovina, the Carpathians, Transcarpathia; historically also Podlachia and the Lemko and Sian lands now in Poland | Volhynian, Podillian; Dniester (Galician), Sian, Pokuttia–Bukovina; Carpathian: Boyko, Hutsul, Lemko, Transcarpathian |
| **south-eastern** | південно-східне наріччя | the Middle Dnieper (Kyiv, Poltava, Cherkasy), Sloboda Ukraine (Kharkiv), the steppe south and east | Middle Dnieper, Slobozhan, Steppe |

The standard language rests on the **Middle Dnieper** dialects of the south-eastern group. Simovych put it plainly in 1919: the written language grew out of the speech of the Kyiv, Poltava and southern Chernihiv lands, the heartland across which people had moved for centuries so that local differences levelled out, and from which the new literature began (Simovych 1919, intro §§ on «Українська письменницька мова»). He added that the dialects of Ukraine are few for so large a territory and shade gradually into one another, so that the written language is understood everywhere; only Transcarpathian, some Galician and Bukovinian speech (Hutsuls, Lemkos, Boykos, the Pidhirja), Polissian and northern Chernihiv speech stand out more sharply.

Shvedova & von Waldenfels (2021) restate the same history from the corpus side: the modern standard began at the end of the 18th century on the basis of south-eastern, south-western and northern dialects that differed considerably; the division of Ukrainians between the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires, and the different roof languages (Polish in the west, Russian in the east), deepened the differences.

An older grouping is worth knowing because older books use it: Krymskyi (1907, vol. 1, §§ II–III) divided the language into a **western** and an **eastern** branch and set apart in each the **archaic**, diphthongal dialects (Carpathian and Podlachian in the west, Polissian in the east). His note that in the 18th century the whole Kyiv region still spoke "as only Polissia speaks now" is a reminder that dialect boundaries move.

The material for a fine-grained map exists in part outside Ukraine as well: the Common Slavic Linguistic Atlas (ОЛА / ЗЛА) recorded Ukrainian speech at 132 of its 859 points (121 in Ukraine, 11 in Russia, Belarus, Romania and Moldova), with a questionnaire of 3,454 questions; much of the recorded material has never been mapped (Hrytsenko et al. 2019).

### 1.2 How the varieties are described: standard + delta

Every variety in this chapter (a dialect group, the diaspora norm, surzhyk, song) is described as a **delta over the literary standard**: the grammar of chapters 01–29 stays as it is, and a short table says which rules change (phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax) and which words are added or replaced (lexicon). A row gives the standard form, the variety's form, an example and the source or count. What a table does not list is as in the standard. The same convention is used for the older layers in [9. Older Ukrainian and the old forms alive today](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) and for the registers (permitted colloquial, slang and rap, officialese, song) in [19. The lexicon: where the words come from, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) §7. The dialect forms below are typical of the group, not uniform across it.

### 1.3 Northern (Polissian) delta

The northern dialects are the "archaic" ones of Krymskyi: the change *o, e > i* in a newly closed syllable stopped there half-way.

| area | standard | northern | example | source / count |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| phonology | *i* from *o, e* in a closed syllable | diphthongs *уо, уы, юо, юы, іе* | standard *кінь, віл, піч*; Polissian diphthongal forms of the same words | Krymskyi 1907 §II |
| phonology | unstressed *е* and *и* close together | kept more distinct |  | commonly described; not measured here |
| lexicon / form | *від* 'from' (main), *од* variant | *од* main | *од хати* | GRAC: *од* main in Polissian texts (Shvedova & von Waldenfels 2021) |

### 1.4 South-western delta

The south-western group is the most differentiated; its subgroups are Volhynian, Podillian, Dniester (Galician), Sian, Pokuttia–Bukovina and the Carpathian dialects (Boyko, Hutsul, Lemko, Transcarpathian). It gave the standard much of its western vocabulary.

| area | standard | south-western form | example | where / source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| phonology | geminate from old *-ьj-* | single consonant | *житє, весілє, насінє, подвірє* for *життя, весілля, насіння, подвір'я* | Podillia to Transcarpathia; Simovych 1919 (doubled consonants) |
| phonology | epenthetic *л* after labials | none | *любю, лупю* for *люблю, луплю* | Hutsul, Pidhirja; Stefanyk, Fedkovych in dialogue (Simovych 1919) |
| phonology | hard *ч, ш, ж* | soft |  | Hutsul, Pidhirja, parts of Bukovina (Simovych 1919 §44) |
| phonology (stress) | free, mobile | fixed on the penult |  | Lemko only; standard dialectology, not measured here |
| orthography (old western print) | *-ся* joined; apostrophe | *ся* apart; no apostrophe; *ї* after consonants | *береть ся, пять, сїно* | Galician print to the 1920s; Simovych 1919 ([09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §5) |
| morphology | past = *l*-form + subject pronoun | *l*-form + person clitic | *spav=jem* 'I slept', *xoč=im sja včyla* 'though I learned' | Dniester dialect; Fellerer 2022 |
| morphology / syntax | reflexive *-ся* fused to the verb | mobile clitic *ся, си, са, с'а, с'і* before, after or away from the verb, among pronoun clitics *ми, ти, мя, тя, го, му* | *бояв би са* 'he would be afraid' | Bukovinian, Hutsul, Lemko, Podillian, South Bessarabian; Kolesnykov 2025 |
| syntax | subject pronoun usually expressed in the past | dropped more often |  | Dniester dialect, small sample; Fellerer 2022 |
| lexicon | *картопля* 'potato' | *бараболя*; *крумплі* (Transcarpathia); *мандибурка* (Bukovina) |  | GRAC: western texts only (Shvedova & von Waldenfels 2021); Leipzig news 2024: 0 each vs *картопля/-і* 705 |
| lexicon | *сковорідка* 'frying pan' | *пательня* |  | news 2024: *пательня/-і* 50, *сковорідка/-у* 75 |
| lexicon | *гарний, добре* | *файний, файно* |  | news 2024: 1, 4 |
| lexicon | *чашка, кухоль* | *філіжанка* 'cup', *горнятко* 'mug' |  | news 2024: 4, 14 |
| lexicon | *господар* | *ґазда* |  | news 2024: 7 |

### 1.5 South-eastern delta

The south-eastern dialects (Middle Dnieper, Slobozhan, Steppe) are the youngest and the most uniform: the steppe south and the Sloboda lands were settled from the Dnieper and from the west in the 17th–19th centuries, the "colonisation movement of the Ukrainian people to the east, southeast and south" that Rudnytskyi (1918) describes. The Middle Dnieper dialects are the base of the standard, so their grammatical delta is close to empty. Their delta today is mainly **lexical and contact-driven**: the cities of the east and south were Russian-speaking for most of the 20th century, and the steppe and Slobozhan dialects carry more Russian loans than any other group. This is where surzhyk (§5) is strongest.

| area | standard | south-eastern form | example | source / count |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| lexicon / form | *від* | *од* frequent in older texts |  | GRAC, other macroregions before the 1930s (Shvedova & von Waldenfels 2021) |
| lexicon | standard words | more Russian loans in rural and urban speech | see surzhyk delta (§5.3) | Hentschel 2023 |

## 2. Regional colour in the standard

People who speak the standard do not speak the same standard everywhere. A Lviv speaker, a Kyiv speaker and a Kharkiv speaker are told apart by words, by a few forms and by the place of the stress, while their grammar is the same.

### 2.1 West

Western standard speech (Galicia, Bukovina, Volhynia, Transcarpathia) is the standard plus a small delta, most of it lexical, taken from the south-western dialects (§1.4) and from the old Galician written norm, with words shared with Polish and, in the south-west, Romanian and Hungarian:

| area | standard (all-Ukrainian) | western delta | example | source / count |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| morphology (particle) | *б* after vowels, *би* after consonants | full *би* more often | *я би сказав* | pre-war western novels in GRAC (Lahjouji-Seppälä et al. 2022) |
| syntax (prepositions) | *перед* mainly spatial; *при* 'at, by' | wider functions, e.g. temporal *перед* |  | Lahjouji-Seppälä et al. 2022 |
| lexicon | *дуже* (colloquial 'really') | *фест* |  | news 2024: 10 |
| lexicon | dialect words of §1.4 | *файно, ґазда, пательня, горнятко, філіжанка* |  | news 2024: 4, 7, 50, 14, 4 |

These words live in western speech and regional writing, not in the national news (counts over the Leipzig *ukr_news_2024* sample, 14.2 million words, CC BY; 2026-11-06; method under "Counts" at the end).

### 2.2 Centre

Central speech (Kyiv, Poltava, Cherkasy, Chernihiv) is closest to the standard, which is built on it. What a central speaker does that a western one may not is mostly the reverse: fewer western lexical choices, and in colloquial speech more Russian loans than in the west.

### 2.3 East and South

In the east (Kharkiv, the Donbas, Dnipro) and the south (Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia) the regional colour of the standard comes from Russian: in the speech of people who grew up in Russian-speaking cities, and in surzhyk. Since 2014 and especially since 2022 the language situation of these regions has been changing fast (Taranenko 2023; Kanishcheva et al. 2023); Hentschel & Palinska (2022) found in a survey of 1,200 people in the three Black Sea oblasts in 2020–2021, before the full-scale invasion, that nearly a quarter of ethnic Ukrainians who had spoken only Russian as children now also used Ukrainian frequently, often together with surzhyk. In the Verkhovna Rada, the share of Ukrainian in the plenary record rose from a minimum of 76% in 1995 to 100% in 2018–2020 (Kanishcheva et al. 2023).

## 3. Two centres: the Galician and the Dnieper norm

### 3.1 Why there were two

Under the Russian Empire, the Valuev circular of 18 July 1863 banned the printing of Ukrainian books other than fiction (Danylenko & Naienko 2022), and the decree of 1876 (the Ems decree) closed the border between the two parts of Ukraine to Ukrainian books (Simovych 1919). Ukrainian schooling, scholarship and journalism therefore developed in Austrian Galicia and Bukovina, on the basis of western dialects. When printing became possible again in the Russian Empire after 1905, the Dnieper written language began to absorb what the Galicians had built: a scholarly vocabulary, school terminology, the language of the press (Simovych 1919). Shvedova & von Waldenfels (2021), following Hrytsenko, distinguish for the 19th and early 20th century the Middle Dnieper, Galician, Bukovinian, Transcarpathian and Rusyn variants of the written language; in the late 19th and early 20th century the two large ones, Middle Dnieper and Galician, influenced each other until they became territorial variants of one standard.

### 3.2 The quarrel

The meeting of the two was not peaceful. In the 1900s–1910s the Kyiv press carried a "language discussion" on whether the Galician written forms belonged in the common language. Two documents of it are in our library.

Krymskyi, by Simovych's account, called the language of Galician school books a "Lviv jargon" (*львівський жаргон*), blaming textbook authors who did not know the popular language well (Simovych 1919, §§ on school books).

Ivan Nechui-Levytskyi's grammar of 1913–1914 is the fullest statement of the Dnieper purist side. It rejects as Polish or Galician a list of words and forms, among them:

| rejected by Nechui-Levytskyi (1913–14) | his reason | counts, Leipzig news 2024 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *зрозумілий, зрозуміло* 'understandable' | "badly derived in Galicia"; write *неясно, незрозуміливо* | *зрозуміло* 831, *зрозумілий* 57 |
| *відчувати, відчуття* 'feel, feeling' | built on the Polish prefix *u-/od-*, wrong meaning | *відчувати* 591, *відчуття* 1,135 |
| *уникати* 'avoid' | Polish prefix use; say *одмикувати* | *уникати* 738 |
| *рух* 'movement' | a Polish word; say *рушіння* | *рух* 1,465 |
| *лиш, лише* 'only' | Galician; readers will not understand | *лише* 15,270, *лиш* 102 |
| *зі мною* 'with me' | no independent preposition *зі* in Ukrainian; say *зо мною* | *зі* 14,308, *зо* 39 |
| *клюб, фльот, кляса* | Polish softening of *l* | (Galician and diaspora print; current spelling *клуб, флот, клас*) |
| *нация, поезия* | Polish ending; write *нація, поезія* | (Nechui's spelling won) |

(Nechui-Levytskyi 1913, part 1, §§ on prepositions and adjectives; counts of word forms in the Leipzig *ukr_news_2024* sample, 2026-11-06.)

Almost every word he rejected is now plain standard Ukrainian, and the words he proposed instead (*одмикувати, рушіння, зо мною*) are rare or gone. On the spelling of loans his side won: the Galician *-ия* gave way to *-ія*. The table is a fair picture of how Ukrainian norms are settled: not by the authority of a grammar but by what writers and speakers use. Lahjouji-Seppälä et al. (2022) found, in a stylometric study of pre-war and post-war novels by Lviv and Kyiv authors, that Nechui-Levytskyi himself is an outlier, set apart by his frequent *неначе* 'as if' (still in use: 41 occurrences in the 2024 news sample, against 367 of *наче* and 95 of *немов*).

### 3.3 1928, 1933 and after

The first comprehensive spelling and grammatical norm for all of Ukraine was the orthography of 1928 (the "Kharkiv" or "Skrypnyk" orthography), a compromise between the two traditions; it wrote, for example, Greek *θ* as *т* (*етер, катедра, міт*) and kept the letter *ґ* (Pravopys 1928 §57). In 1933 it was changed by decree towards the Middle Dnieper variant and towards Russian; the western diaspora after the Second World War did not follow that change and went on writing by the 1928 rules (Shvedova & von Waldenfels 2021). Lahjouji-Seppälä et al. (2022) measured the result in fiction: pre-war western and eastern novels form two clearly separate stylometric clusters; post-war novels cluster much more weakly, so the two variants converged, and the break with the pre-war tradition was sharper in the west than in the east.

### 3.4 2019: variants offered, and what usage took

The orthography of 2019 (Pravopys 2019) returned several forms of the 1928 tradition, in most cases as **permitted variants** beside the forms of the later norm, and introduced *проєкт* with *є* for the earlier *проект*. Usage took some and left others. In the Leipzig samples (CC BY; counts of 2026-11-06):

| form pair | news 2018 | Wikipedia 2021 | news 2024 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *проект* : *проєкт* (nominative) | 4,414 : 3 | 1,469 : 758 | 364 : 1,611 |
| *проекту* : *проєкту* | 3,297 : 0 | 1,445 : 657 | 327 : 1,581 |
| *ефір* : *етер* | 240 : 4 | 165 : 6 | 69 : 6 |
| *міф* : *міт* | 220 : 7 | 104 : 15 | 120 : 9 |
| *Афіни* : *Атени* | 51 : 3 | 72 : 3 | 7 : 0 |
| *можливості* : *можливости* (gen. sg. / nom. pl.) | 2,182 : 3 | 1,596 : 3 | 3,415 : 0 |
| *ґрунт* : *грунт* | 120 : 53 | 328 : 8 | 554 : 59 |

The one change made obligatory, *проєкт*, went from almost nothing to about 82% of the forms in five years of news; the parliamentary transcripts of UD Ukrainian ParlaMint, including those of 2022, still write *законопроект* (426 forms with *-проект-*, none with *-проєкт-* in the whole treebank, 2026-11-06). The variants offered as equal (*етер, міт, Атени*, genitive *-ости*) stayed marginal. The letter *ґ*, restored in 1990, is now usual in the words where the norm prescribes it. The orthography itself is described in [6. Spelling rules and the 2019 orthography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/); the point here is that codification followed usage where usage existed and did not create it where it did not.

## 4. The diaspora

### 4.1 The old emigration

Mass emigration from the western Ukrainian lands began in the 1890s. Rudnytskyi, writing in 1918, counted more than half a million Ukrainians in the United States (miners and factory workers, many of whom returned home, and who "usually lose their nationality in the second generation"), more than 200,000 in Canada, where compact farming settlements in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta formed "language islands of some size", and about 60,000 farming settlers in Brazil, chiefly in Paraná, with smaller groups in Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, São Paulo and Argentina (Rudnytskyi 1918, ch. on the Ukrainian territory). Krymskyi (1907) already counted the colonists in America among the speakers of the western branch. These emigrants were peasants from Galicia and Bukovina, and the varieties they took were south-western dialects. Canadian and Brazilian Ukrainian kept them for generations, with loans from English and Portuguese.

### 4.2 The post-war emigration and its norm

After the Second World War a second, largely educated emigration, many of them from Galicia and from the displaced-persons camps, settled in the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe. It kept the 1928 orthography and the pre-1933 grammar and vocabulary, and it built schools, publishing houses, academic institutions and newspapers on them. GRAC is so far the only Ukrainian corpus that marks diaspora texts by country of origin; in GRAC v.10 the diaspora subcorpus has about 40 million tokens, mostly fiction and non-fiction (Shvedova & von Waldenfels 2021).

The **diaspora delta** over the present standard:

| area | standard (2019) | diaspora written norm | example | source / count |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| orthography | Greek *θ* as *ф* (variant *т* permitted since 2019) | *т* | *катедра, етер, міт, Атени* | Pravopys 1928 §57; Leipzig news 2024: *етер* 6 vs *ефір* 69 |
| orthography / morphology | gen. sg. of fem. nouns in *-ость*: *-ості* (variant *-ости* permitted since 2019) | *-ости* | *радости, можливости* | Pravopys 2019 §10 (variant); news 2024: *можливости* 0 vs *можливості* 3,415 |
| orthography | *ґ* in a set of native and old words | *ґ* more widely, also in loans for *g* | *ґанок, ґудзик*; *Ґете* | Pravopys 1928 §§55, 66 |
| orthography | *л* hard in loans | Polish-style soft *ль* in older diaspora texts | *клюб, кляса, фльот* for *клуб, клас, флот* | Galician print; Nechui-Levytskyi 1913 opposed them |
| morphology | loans in *-о* (*авто, кіно, метро, радіо*) indeclinable | declined | *в авті, з кіна* | declined in Ukraine to c. 1945, indeclinable 1950–1990, declined again but less since 1991; higher share in the diaspora in every period (Shvedova & von Waldenfels 2021) |
| lexicon | standard vocabulary | western words (§1.4, §2.1); loans from the host language | English, Portuguese loans in Canadian and Brazilian Ukrainian | Rudnytskyi 1918 (settlements); no measurement in our library |

The noun chapter ([11. Nouns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/)) gives the paradigms.

### 4.3 The emigration since 2022

The full-scale invasion of 2022 produced the largest Ukrainian emigration since the Second World War, mostly of women and children, mostly to the European Union. Its speakers come from every region, many of them from the Russian-speaking east and south, and they speak the present standard, colloquial Ukrainian, surzhyk and Russian in every proportion. None of the sources in our library measures the language of this emigration yet; Hentschel (2023) notes that internal displacement and migration after February 2022 are likely to change the linguistic situation substantially. This manual makes no claim about it.

## 5. Surzhyk

### 5.1 What it is

*Суржик* (*suržyk*) is originally the word for a mixture of grains, wheat with rye or barley, and by transfer for mixed Ukrainian–Russian speech. In the sense of this chapter it is the everyday spoken variety, Ukrainian-based in its grammar and largely in its sounds, with a large share of Russian words and some Russian forms, used by millions of people in central, eastern and southern Ukraine, usually alongside the standard Ukrainian or Russian they also command.

Surzhyk is three things that are often confused, and it is none of them:

- It is **not the literary standard**. No surzhyk form is codified, and the standard defines itself partly against it: the "Russianisms" that dictionaries list as objectionable (VESUM marks over 9,300 single-word Russianisms with suggested replacements; Starko & Rysin 2025) are the typical material of surzhyk.
- It is **not permitted colloquial Ukrainian**. Colloquial Ukrainian has its own non-literary forms that are Ukrainian in origin and spread across the language area: *шо* for *що* 'what, that', *нема* for *немає* 'there is not', *шось, тре'*, shortened forms of address, dialect words. A speaker who says *шо ти робиш?* speaks colloquial Ukrainian; a speaker who says *шо ти щас дєлаєш?*, with Russian *щас* 'now' and *дєлать* 'do' in Ukrainian frame, speaks surzhyk. (Normative resources do not always draw this line: VESUM marks *шо* as well as *слідуючий, співпадати, тормозити* with the same tag `:bad`.)
- It is **not random mixing**, although that is the view of it most often stated in Ukraine. The corpus studies of §5.3 found stable preferences that are the same across regions.

Hentschel & Taranenko (2021; Ukrainian version 2022) describe the language situation of Ukraine not as bilingualism but as **"tricodalism"**: Ukrainian, Russian and mixed speech, often used by the same people in different situations. Earlier surveys offered no surzhyk option, or (KIIS 2003) let telephone interviewers decide what a person spoke. In interviews where respondents rated their own use of each code, the West–Centre–South division becomes a gradual continuum; in the Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy oblasts only one respondent in ten did not often speak surzhyk in everyday life.

### 5.2 Old and new surzhyk

The researchers distinguish two kinds (Hentschel 2023; Hentschel & Taranenko 2022):

- **"Canonical", Ukrainian-based surzhyk** developed over many decades, at the latest from the late 19th century, when Ukrainian-speaking villagers moved into Russian-speaking towns and Russian became the language of school, army and administration. It is spoken in the traditional Ukrainian dialect area of the centre, by people whose families have spoken it for generations, and it is passed on in the family. These are the conditions under which a mixed variety can stabilise into a "fused lect".
- **"Neo-surzhyk"**, Russian-based mixed speech of people who grew up in Russian and moved towards Ukrainian after 1991, is expected in regions where Russian was historically strong (the Black Sea coast, Kharkiv). Hentschel (2023) doubts that it has had time to stabilise: about thirty years is short of the three or four generations that dialect research expects for a new variety to settle.

### 5.3 Its forms, measured

The Oldenburg projects (Fritz Thyssen Foundation; DFG; FWF) recorded family conversations and semi-structured interviews in eleven central oblasts (2010/11, 2014/15) and in the Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts (2020/21), about 730,000 word forms in all, 47% from the centre and 53% from the south (Hentschel 2023). Only utterances with a considerable degree of mixing were transcribed in detail, so the counts describe the core of surzhyk, not Ukrainian or Russian speech of the same people.

The **surzhyk delta** over the standard, in one table; the measurements behind it follow.

| area | standard | surzhyk | example | source / count |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| lexicon (replacement, stable) | *теж* 'also' | *тоже* | 95.4% *тоже* | Hentschel 2023 |
| lexicon (replacement, stable) | *треба, потрібно* 'one must' | *надо* | *надо* 72%, *треба* 25%, *потрібно* 2%, *нужно* 1% | Hentschel 2023 |
| lexicon (particle) | *так* 'yes' | *да* | almost always *да* | Hentschel 2023; ParlaMint (edited of code-switching): *да* 14 vs *так* 209 |
| lexicon (overall) | Ukrainian lexeme | the Ukrainian or the Russian one, fixed per word: 37 of 107 pairs stably Ukrainian, 30 stably Russian, 40 variable |  | Hentschel 2023 |
| lexicon (discourse words) | *зараз, взагалі, звичайно, дякую* | *щас, вообщє, канєшно, спасибі* |  | described in the literature; news 2024: *спасибі* 53 vs *дякую* 876 |
| morphology (infinitive) | *-ти* | *-ть* in about 3 of 4 infinitives, by dialect substrate and stem origin | *читать, сказать* | Hentschel & Palinska 2022a (9,684 infinitives); UD IU 0.9%, ParlaMint 0.5% *-ть* |
| morphology (inflection) | Ukrainian endings | Ukrainian endings on Russian stems (congruent lexicalisation) | *дєлаєш* 'you do' (Russian stem, Ukrainian ending) | Hentschel 2023 |
| phonology | Ukrainian phonetics | Russian words in Ukrainian phonetics: [ɦ], [ɪ], no *akanje*; Russian *е* after hard consonants spelled *є* in stylisation | *канєшно, вообщє* | commonly described; not measured instrumentally |
| syntax | Ukrainian | weaker Russian influence than on the lexicon |  | Hentschel 2023 |

**Lexicon.** Hentschel (2023) studied 107 frequent "hyperlexemes", pairs or sets of Ukrainian and Russian equivalents that compete in mixed utterances, with nearly 103,000 tokens:

| class | share of Ukrainian realisations | hyperlexemes | share of tokens |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| very stable / stable Ukrainian | > 90% / > 80% | 17 + 20 = 37 | over 50% |
| very stable / stable Russian | > 90% / > 80% | 12 + 18 = 30 | 21% |
| slightly variable | > 66% Ukrainian or Russian | 5 + 14 = 19 |  |
| variable | about half | 21 |  |

So 67 of the 107 pairs, carrying 72% of the tokens, show a clear preference for one side, almost the same in the centre and in the south; neither token frequency nor the age or education of the speaker predicts it (examples in the delta table). A smaller group is stable only regionally, and a third varies everywhere; for these the regional strength of Russian matters. Hentschel classifies most of the mixing, in Muysken's terms, as congruent lexicalisation, and concludes that surzhyk is "a lect of its own" with its own lexical norms: a lect of Ukrainian, as English is a Germanic language despite its Romance vocabulary. Belarusian *trasjanka* is far more russified in its lexicon.

**Morphology: the infinitive.** Standard Ukrainian ends the infinitive in syllabic *-ти* (*читати* 'read'); standard Russian in non-syllabic *-ть* (*читать*); many Ukrainian dialects have *-ть* too. In 9,684 infinitives of the surzhyk corpus, about one in four takes *-ти* and three take *-ть* (Hentschel & Palinska 2022a). The choice is not free. It depends on the dialect substrate: where the local dialects have only *-ти* (Khmelnytskyi, Vinnytsia) surzhyk has *-ти* in about nine cases of ten; where they have only *-ть*, *-ть* reaches about 90%; mixed areas lean towards *-ть* (about 80%). It also depends on the stem: Russian stems take *-ти* much less often than Ukrainian ones ("morphologic-etymological agreement"). A mixed model with these two factors explains 56% of the variation; no other factor reaches significance. The highest share of the Russian-like *-ть* is on the northern and eastern periphery, most clearly in the Kharkiv oblast, where *-ть* dominates in surzhyk although local dialects mostly have *-ти*. The authors read surzhyk as a **mesolectal continuum** between the dialects and the two standards, regionally differentiated like a dialect continuum, combining dialect levelling with (post)colonial hybridisation.

For comparison, the written standard and parliamentary speech: in UD Ukrainian IU 2.18 (train + dev + test), 22 of 2,384 infinitives end in *-ть(ся)* (0.9%); in UD Ukrainian ParlaMint 2.18, 16 of 3,409 (0.5%), most of them *сказать* and *передать* in spontaneous speech (counts of 2026-11-06; IU is counted, not quoted).

**Sounds.** The phonetic delta in the table is the description found in the literature; Hentschel (2023, n. 17) notes only that the vowel of such words may be more open in the Ukrainian and more closed in the Russian realisation. No study in our library measures surzhyk phonetics instrumentally.

**Syntax** is the least studied part. The Russian impact on grammar is "much weaker" than on the lexicon but exists (Hentschel 2023, citing Hentschel 2018 and Del Gaudio 2010).

### 5.4 Where it lives

Surzhyk is a vernacular of the immediate environment: family, neighbours, colleagues. With strangers, speakers switch to standard Ukrainian or Russian, which most of them command at least acceptably (Hentschel 2023). It is strongest in the eastern part of central Ukraine and the western part of the Black Sea coast (Hentschel & Palinska 2022a). Among the 1,200 respondents of the Black Sea survey, surzhyk was about as common a language of childhood as Ukrainian or Russian; each of the three codes was in permanent or frequent use by almost half of the respondents, though the speakers who use almost only surzhyk are a small type (between roughly 5 and 10% of respondents, like the bicodal types); and more than a third agreed, fully or with reservations, that surzhyk was their native language (Hentschel & Palinska 2022b). In written Ukrainian it appears as stylisation: in fiction, satire, comedy and advertising, where it marks a character socially and is almost always comic or pitying; Shvedova & von Waldenfels (2021) note that stylised surzhyk elements in fiction and scholarship cannot be kept out of a reference corpus.

### 5.5 What it means socially

In Ukrainian public discourse surzhyk is stigmatised: it is called a sign of low education, of a provincial or rural origin, and of colonial heritage, the trace of Russification. Hentschel (2023) finds the emotion understandable, given the repression of Ukrainian since the 19th century, but thinks the ideological approach unhelpful for scholarship; he notes that the "chaos" view rests on impressionistic observation rather than on variationist method. For its speakers surzhyk is first of all the language of home. Its use is shrinking where Ukrainian advances, and growing in prestige nowhere; but for most people who speak it, it is one of two or three codes they move between, and the move towards Ukrainian in the last decade has gone through it. The register chapter (37) returns to its stylistic uses.

### 5.6 How this manual treats a surzhyk form

A form is described here as **surzhyk** when it is a Russian word or form in a Ukrainian grammatical frame in spoken mixed speech (*щас, тоже, надо, дєлать, канєшно*); as **colloquial Ukrainian** when it is a non-standard but Ukrainian form in general use (*шо, нема, тре'*); as a **calque** or **Russianism of the written language** when it occurs in edited writing (*приймати участь* for *брати участь*, *слідуючий* for *наступний*, *являтися* for *бути*; see [19. The lexicon: where the words come from, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) §4); and as **dialect** when it belongs to a dialect region (*файно, ґазда*). The boundaries are fuzzy, which is the nature of a continuum; the labels describe use, not worth.

## 6. Songs

Songs are a register of their own (style of speech "song"), and their grammar differs from the standard in ways a parser meets at once: word order is driven by rhyme and metre, function words are dropped or doubled, and dialect, archaic and surzhyk forms are used for effect without carrying the stigma they carry in prose.

The **song delta** over the standard:

| area | standard | song | example | source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| morphology (adjective) | contracted long forms | uncontracted long forms | *добрії люде, зеленая ліщинонька, молодая дівчинонька* | Nechui-Levytskyi 1913 (folk songs) |
| morphology (adjective) | long forms (*повний*) | short forms beyond the standard set | *Пливе човен води повен* | Nechui-Levytskyi 1913 |
| morphology (verb) | 1pl *-мо* | short *-м* | *запануєм* | anthem text ([09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §6.7) |
| phonology / metre | standard syllable count | prothetic or dropped vowels for the metre | *ізов'яла* for *зів'яла* | Nechui-Levytskyi 1913 (quoted song) |
| syntax (word order) | adjective before noun, neutral order | inversion driven by rhyme and metre | *калина червона* beside *червона калина* |  |
| syntax | full clauses | function words dropped or doubled; vocative as refrain |  |  |
| lexicon / word formation | one diminutive | stacked diminutives | *ліщинонька, сонечко, дівчинонька* |  |
| lexicon | standard words | dialect, archaic and surzhyk words for effect, without stigma | western *файно, ґазда*; Russian words marking a character |  |

Folk songs keep forms the literary language lost long ago; Nechui-Levytskyi (1913) called the long forms a remnant of the dead old language not to be used in literary prose. They are still sung.

Modern popular song uses surzhyk and dialect openly. Comic stage personas built on surzhyk have been among the best-known Ukrainian performers; western dialect words (*файно, ґазда*) and Russian ones mark a singer's origin or a character in the lyric. In this register a surzhyk form is a stylistic choice, not an error, and a description of song lyrics has to treat it as such. Chapter 37 describes the register in full.

## 7. Rusyn

Rusyn is spoken mainly in the Carpathian region: in Transcarpathian Ukraine, in eastern Slovakia, and in south-eastern Poland, where it is called Lemko. Its status is disputed: some scholars treat it as a dialect group of Ukrainian (the south-western Carpathian dialects of §1.4), others as an independent Slavic language. Ukrainian is the standard language closest to the Rusyn varieties, but they have distinct features at every level and stand between East and West Slavic; their speakers are under pressure from the state languages Ukrainian, Slovak and Polish, and the old dialect continuum is diverging along the state borders. Official figures counted 110,750 Rusyns; an "informed estimate" gives no fewer than 1,762,500 (Rabus & Scherrer 2017, citing Magocsi 2015). Rabus & Scherrer built a morphological dictionary for spoken Rusyn from Ukrainian, Slovak, Polish and Russian resources with edit-distance and hand-written transformation rules, raising coverage by 42.9 points over exact matching.

This manual describes Ukrainian. It treats the Carpathian dialects as dialects of Ukrainian where they are spoken in Ukraine, and leaves the question of a Rusyn language to the sources.

## 8. How Mova handles varieties

**Mova has no variety model for Ukrainian.** It has no dialect lexicon, no regional labels, no surzhyk detector and no normaliser from older or diaspora spelling to the current one.

- **The delta principle, and the missing layer.** In this manual a variety is the standard model plus a delta (the tables of §§1.3–1.5, 2.1, 4.2, 5.3 and 6). Mova has no delta layer yet: no place where a rule change or a word replacement can be stored and switched on for a variety. The nearest hook is VESUM's style tags (`:arch`, `:slang`, `:bad`, `:alt`) as read through `kg`, which already mark some delta words, though `kg` drops them (next point).
- **What reads Ukrainian at all.** The `kg` crate (`kg/src/uk.rs`, `kg/src/morph.rs`, `kg/src/gram.rs`) analyses word forms with VESUM (`dict_corp_vis.txt.bz2`, CC BY-NC-SA, so a research and test path only). VESUM carries style tags: in the release Mova holds, 13,876 lemma lines are tagged `:bad` (misspellings, Russianisms and some colloquial forms such as *шо*), 4,070 `:slang`, 9,526 `:arch` (archaic or, in places, dialectal) and 1,465 `:alt` (alternative spellings), of 442,458 lemma lines (counted 2026-11-06). `Gram::from_vesum` skips every tag it does not know, so the style tags never reach Mova's four-byte grammar code: a Russianism tagged `:bad` is parsed like any other word, and nothing marks it. A dialect or surzhyk form that VESUM lacks makes the simple-sentence parser reject the sentence with "word not in VESUM" (`Reject::Unknown`).
- **The tokenizer** (`uk::tokenize`) joins hyphens and the apostrophes ' ’ ʼ inside words and normalises them to one apostrophe (`morph::norm`), so the spellings *м'ясо, м’ясо, мʼясо* are one word. It does not normalise *ся* written apart (Galician *береть ся*) or the 1928 spellings.
- **The English parser on UD Ukrainian.** The treebanks Mova can train on are UD Ukrainian IU (mostly written: fiction, news, legal and other texts) and ParlaMint (parliamentary speech 2003–2022, from which the code-switched Ukrainian–Russian passages were removed by the treebank's authors). Neither has dialect or variety labels. Through `en xpos-fill` and `en parse-eval` (train → dev, 2026-11-06) the English parser reaches LAS 73.43 on IU with its own tags and 78.17 with gold tags.
- **What would be needed.** For regional and diaspora variants, a table of variant pairs (*від/од, -ості/-ости, проєкт/проект, авто* declined or not) attached to lemmas, so that a form can be recognised and labelled rather than rejected; GRAC's regional annotation (CC BY paper, corpus not held) is the model. For surzhyk, a lexicon of hyperlexemes with their Ukrainian partners and the regularities of §5.3 would let Mova recognise and label mixed speech; VESUM's replacement lists are a start, under a non-commercial licence. None of this is built, and no figure in this chapter comes from Mova.

## Counts

All counts of 2026-11-06.

- Leipzig Corpora Collection (CC BY; Goldhahn, Eckart & Quasthoff 2012), samples of 1 million sentences each: `ukr_news_2024` (14.2 M words), `ukr_newscrawl_2018` (14.8 M words; crawled 2018, texts partly older), `ukr_wikipedia_2021` (14.6 M words), from frames.zst. Word forms were lowercased, apostrophe variants unified, and counted as whole words; phrases as whole-word sequences.
- UD Ukrainian IU 2.18 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only) and UD Ukrainian ParlaMint 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0), train + dev + test, from ud-treebanks-v2.18.
- VESUM `dict_corp_vis.txt.bz2` as held in uk-vesum-dict-uk (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only): lemma lines (unindented) by style tag.

## Sources for this chapter

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- Mova: `kg/src/uk.rs`, `kg/src/morph.rs`, `kg/src/gram.rs`; `en/src/main.rs` (`xpos_fill`, `parse_eval`).
- [← previous 7. Punctuation, capitals, abbreviations and numbers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/07-punctuation-typography/)
- [next → 9. Older Ukrainian and the old forms alive today](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/)
- [↑ back to Ukrainian: a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/)