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# 37. Register and variation

**On this page**

1. [1. The label of a text: language, dialect, style](#1-the-label-of-a-text-language-dialect-style)
2. [2. The character of the standard: conservative and modern](#2-the-character-of-the-standard-conservative-and-modern)
3. [3. Literary norm, permitted colloquial speech and surzhyk](#3-literary-norm-permitted-colloquial-speech-and-surzhyk)
4. [4. The styles of speech as deltas](#4-the-styles-of-speech-as-deltas)
5. [5. Register as co-occurring features in the treebanks](#5-register-as-co-occurring-features-in-the-treebanks)
6. [6. Russianisms and anglicisms, judged by measured usage](#6-russianisms-and-anglicisms-judged-by-measured-usage)
7. [7. Surzhyk](#7-surzhyk)
8. [8. Song lyrics: a style with its own grammar](#8-song-lyrics-a-style-with-its-own-grammar)
9. [9. The dialect modifier](#9-the-dialect-modifier)
10. [10. Norms, orthographies and house styles](#10-norms-orthographies-and-house-styles)
11. [11. How Mova handles it](#11-how-mova-handles-it)
12. [In Mova](#in-mova)
13. [12. Sources](#12-sources)

The same Ukrainian grammar is used differently in a law of the Verkhovna Rada, a news bulletin, a family conversation in a village near Poltava, a Hutsul story, a soldier's message, a rap verse and a folk song. Some forms cluster in some situations (register, or *style of speech*), some belong to a region (dialect), some to a period, and some to the codified norm of one orthography or to a publisher's house style. A whole further variety stands between Ukrainian and Russian: **surzhyk** (*суржик*, *surzhyk*), which this manual treats as a variety in its own right, with its own regularities, and not as a list of errors.

This chapter describes each variety and style the same way: as a **delta over the literary standard** — which grammar rules change, which words are added or replaced, and what shifts in spelling and pronunciation. It does not describe each variety again in full; the standard is described in the other chapters, and here only the differences are tabulated. It also describes the character of the Ukrainian standard itself, which is at once very conservative and very modern, and the way the codified norm follows usage.

Every treebank count was made on UD 2.18 on 2026-11-06 with `awk` over the CoNLL-U files, all splits, syntactic words without punctuation as the denominator. UD_Ukrainian-IU (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) is used for counts only and never quoted; UD_Ukrainian-ParlaMint (CC BY-SA 4.0) is quoted by `sent_id`. The news counts compare two Leipzig Corpora Collection samples of one million sentences each (CC BY): *ukr_newscrawl_2018* (14.82 M words) and *ukr_news_2024* (14.23 M words), counted with `grep -o -w` on 2026-11-06. The Leipzig samples are web-mined and unchecked; they are used for frequencies only, and no sentence is quoted from them.

Contents

1. [The label of a text: language, dialect, style](#1-the-label-of-a-text-language-dialect-style)
2. [The character of the standard: conservative and modern](#2-the-character-of-the-standard-conservative-and-modern)
3. [Literary norm, permitted colloquial speech and surzhyk](#3-literary-norm-permitted-colloquial-speech-and-surzhyk)
4. [The styles of speech as deltas](#4-the-styles-of-speech-as-deltas)
5. [Register as co-occurring features in the treebanks](#5-register-as-co-occurring-features-in-the-treebanks)
6. [Russianisms and anglicisms, judged by measured usage](#6-russianisms-and-anglicisms-judged-by-measured-usage)
7. [Surzhyk](#7-surzhyk)
8. [Song lyrics: a style with its own grammar](#8-song-lyrics-a-style-with-its-own-grammar)
9. [The dialect modifier](#9-the-dialect-modifier)
10. [Norms, orthographies and house styles](#10-norms-orthographies-and-house-styles)
11. [How Mova handles it](#11-how-mova-handles-it)
12. [Sources](#12-sources)

Related chapters: the dialects and the diaspora in [8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/); spelling and the 2019 orthography in [5. The writing system](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/05-writing-system/) and [6. Spelling rules and the 2019 orthography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/); the vocabulary and its strata 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/); word order in songs and poetry in [29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/); address, *ти/Ви* and the generational deltas of politeness in [32. Politeness and hedging](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/32-politeness-and-hedging/); discourse markers by region and generation in [38. Dialogue and discourse markers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/). Examples are in Cyrillic italics, romanized by the national system of 2010 on first use and glossed.

---

## 1. The label of a text: language, dialect, style

### 1.1 The terms

| term | varies with | Ukrainian examples |
| --- | --- | --- |
| language | — | Ukrainian (`uk`), against Russian, Belarusian, Polish, Rusyn (which has its own standards in Slovakia, Poland and Serbia, and is a separate language code, `rue`) |
| dialect (regional variety) | the speaker's place | Hutsul, Boyko, Lemko, Galician, Podillian, Polissian, Slobozhan, Steppe; diaspora Ukrainian |
| mixed variety | the speaker's history of contact | surzhyk (Ukrainian-based mixed speech), Neo-surzhyk (Russian-based mixed speech in the south) |
| style of speech (register) | the situation: medium, purpose, relation of the speakers, planning | official, scientific, journalistic, literary, colloquial, slang, song |
| genre | the conventional text type | law, court ruling, news report, sermon, parliamentary debate, folk song, rap |
| norm, orthography, house style | the rules a writer follows | the 2019 orthography, the 1928 ("Kharkiv") orthography kept in the diaspora, a newspaper's style book |
| period | time | Old Ukrainian, the vernacular literary language from Kotliarevsky (1798) on, the Soviet standard, the post-1991 standard |

Mova labels a text by three of these, in the order in which they modify one another: the **language** is the base, a **dialect modifier** narrows it to a variety, and a **style of speech** says how the text uses that variety. *uk* + none + *official* is the Ukrainian of a law; *uk* + *hutsul* + *literary* is a Hutsul novel; *uk* + *surzhyk* + *colloquial* is mixed speech at a family table; *uk* + none + *song:folk* is a folk song in the standard spelling of a modern songbook. Surzhyk sits in the dialect slot because, like a dialect, it is a variety defined by its speakers and their history, not by the situation; its speakers also shift style within it (§7). Genre is not a separate slot: a genre usually fixes the style and can be written into the style value where it matters (*official:law*, *song:rap*).

### 1.2 Every variety is a delta over the literary standard

A variety or a style is described here, and is meant to be modelled in Mova, as three deltas over the literary standard:

| delta | what it lists | example (surzhyk) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| grammar Δ | rules that change, are added or are dropped: endings, agreement, government, word order, a construction that appears or disappears | Russian infinitive ending *-ть* beside *-ти*; Russian government *по ділу* |
| lexicon Δ | words that are added, and standard words that are replaced or change meaning | *тоже* for *теж*; *надо* beside *треба*; *неділя* 'week' (standard 'Sunday') |
| orthography and pronunciation Δ | spelling, stress and sounds | *шо* for *що*; unreduced Russian vowels in borrowed words; *да* for *так* |

The point of the delta form is practical. A model that knows the standard needs only the differences to read a variety; a parser trained on the standard meets the deltas as its errors; a register score is a count of deltas. The tables of §§3–9 are written in this form.

## 2. The character of the standard: conservative and modern

Ukrainian is at once very conservative and very modern, and the two sides do not conflict.

**Conservative.** Old forms stay natural in living speech for a long time, and nobody feels self-conscious using them:

| old form | where it lives today | chapter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| the vocative case: *мамо*, *друже*, *Іване*, *пане професоре*, *колего* | everyday speech, parliament, letters, advertising; the norm in address | [32](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/32-politeness-and-hedging/) |
| the synthetic future *читатиму* (*chytatymu*) 'I will be reading' beside *буду читати* | speech and writing, all regions | [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/) |
| the *-но/-то* impersonal (*зроблено*, *вбито*) | official texts, news, speech | [28](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/28-voice-and-passive/) |
| the dual remnant in *дві руці*, *дві нозі* (dialects keep more) | speech, folk song, dialects | [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/) |
| long uncontracted adjectives *ясная*, *зеленую* | folk songs, poetry | §8 |
| old genitive endings *-и* in *радости*, *смерти*, *любови*, *осени* | allowed again as variants by the 2019 orthography (§ 95) | §10 |
| archaic words that are not archaic in use: *отже*, *щонайменше*, *ось*, *пан/пані*, *товариство* 'company', *хата* | everyday speech | [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) |

The parliamentary treebank shows the vocative's vitality in measured form: of the 759 `vocative` arcs in UD_Ukrainian-ParlaMint, 645 are in the vocative case and 114 in the nominative (counts in [chapter 32](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/32-politeness-and-hedging/)); the nominative of address is concentrated in names with patronymics, where usage is moving fastest.

**Modern.** The codified standard moves with usage. This is the stated position of the codifiers themselves. The preface of the 2019 orthography (`ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019`, pp. 4–5), written by the national orthographic commission in which the linguistic institutes of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of the Ukrainian Language among them, took part, says three things that define the method:

- the language of the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century has itself become part of the orthographic tradition, and the codifiers cannot ignore that "a language is made by the history of its people": the language changes, and the orthography must reflect first of all its present state;
- "responding to the challenges of linguistic practice", the new edition widened the use of orthographic variants, because variation is an organic part of a code at every stage;
- which of the variants will become past, "only the future can answer".

The operator of this project states the same principle as the Institute's stance: the official language follows how people speak, and the manuals catch up within years, not over centuries. No separate statement by the Institute is in the research library; the preface is the codified text we cite.

The two newspapers samples, six years apart, show how fast written usage now moves, in both directions — the norm adopting usage and usage adopting the norm:

| item | 2018 news | 2024 news | what happened |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *проєкт*, *проєкту*, *проєкти* | 3 | 3 521 | the 2019 orthography restored *є* after a vowel in this word (a 1928 form); usage followed within five years |
| *проект*, *проекту*, *проекти* | 8 079 | 759 | the old spelling survives in a fifth of the uses |
| *ґрунт* : *грунт* | 116 : 51 | 535 : 53 | the letter *ґ*, restored in 1990, spreads in words where the norm prescribes it |
| *депутатка* | 47 | 233 | feminine role nouns: usage was ahead of the norm; the 2019 orthography (§ 32.4) codified the suffixes *-к(а)*, *-ин(я)*, *-ес(а)*, and use multiplied |
| *міністерка* | 13 | 199 | the same |
| *директорка* | 62 | 203 | the same |
| *-ости* genitive (*радости*, *незалежности*) | 5 | 1 | an allowed old variant that usage does not take up (§10) |
| *етер* : *ефір* | 4 : 231 | 6 : 68 | the same: the variant is codified, the old form stays the norm in use |
| *Европи* : *Європи* | 16 : 3 768 | 1 : 2 875 | a 1928 form not restored in 2019; it disappears |

Two facts follow. Where the codifiers adopted a form already rising in use (feminitives), the codification was quickly confirmed; where they restored an old form (*проєкт*), the media followed because style books follow the orthography; where they allowed a variant without usage behind it (*радости*, *етер*, *міт*), usage simply stays as it was. The variants of 2019 are a description of what writers do and might do, not an order. Synchak & Starko (2022, `synchak-2022-feminine-dictionaries`) show the same order of events for feminine personal nouns: corpora record a large and growing stock of them before the dictionaries do, and online dictionaries lag behind both. Kunch, Lytvyn & Mentynska (2023, `kunch-2023-e-dictionaries-spelling`) checked nine electronic dictionaries against the 2019 orthography and found that only a few (*Slovnyk.ua*, *SUO*, *Horokh*) apply its changes consistently: the reference tools trail both the code and the press.

**Where usage is ahead of the codified norm** on 2026-11-06 (the list is descriptive: each item is common in edited writing or in careful speech and is not, or not yet, recorded as normative):

| item | status in the 2019 code | usage |
| --- | --- | --- |
| feminitives beyond the listed types (*авторка* is listed; military *солдатка* 'woman soldier', *розвідниця*, *снайперка*) | the suffixes are codified; individual words are left to dictionaries | spread widely since 2022 in the press and the army (Synchak 2023, CC BY-SA, paraphrased) |
| *да* 'yes' in speech beside *так* | not in the standard | everyday spoken Ukrainian accepts both (Mova's dictionary records this; §11) |
| the nominative in address with name and patronymic (*Микита Русланович*, ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u138.p6.lang1.s4) | the vocative is prescribed (*Микито Руслановичу*) | common in official speech; see chapter 32 |
| new anglicisms with Ukrainian morphology (*донатити*, *задонатити*, *хайпувати*) | not codified | in the press (§6) |
| *типу* as a hedge and quotative 'like' | not codified in this function | youth speech and the web ([chapter 38](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/)) |

## 3. Literary norm, permitted colloquial speech and surzhyk

Three layers must be kept apart, and the operator's model of them is short: the **literary norm** and **permitted colloquial speech** (*розмовна мова*) differ little; permitted colloquial speech is not surzhyk; and over time the permitted layer grows *out of* surzhyk and out of the dialects, as forms lose their social marking.

| layer | what it is | who judges it | example |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| literary norm | the codified written standard and careful speech | the orthography, the grammars, the dictionaries | *Що ти кажеш? Зараз прийду. Так, звісно.* |
| permitted colloquial | the standard as spoken among equals: shorter forms, particles, ellipsis, regional pronunciation | usage of educated speakers; not an error in its register | *Шо ти кажеш? Ща прийду. Ну да, звісно.* in an eastern speaker's mouth is colloquial; *Та шо ти!* is a southern and eastern colloquial exclamation |
| surzhyk | mixed Ukrainian-Russian speech with its own norms (§7) | its speakers; stigmatised by the norm | *Шо ти гавориш? Щас приду. Канєшно.* |

The delta of permitted colloquial speech over the literary norm is small and mostly in pronunciation, ellipsis and particles:

| Δ | literary norm | permitted colloquial | remark |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| pronunciation | *що* | *шо* (east and south, many dialects) | in the 2018 and 2024 news, *шо* appears 136 and 92 times, almost all in quoted speech |
| truncated verb forms | *знає*, *співає*, *гуляє* | *зна*, *співа*, *гуля* | old forms of the third person, normal in speech and in verse |
| adverbs | *далі*, *зараз* | *дальше* (marked `Style=Arch` 5 times in ParlaMint), *ща*, *щас* (the last is surzhyk for many speakers) |  |
| ellipsis | full clauses | dropped subjects and verbs, fragments | chapter 29 |
| particles | sparing | *ну*, *от*, *та*, *ж*, *бо*, *аж*, *таки* everywhere | chapter 38 |
| 'yes' | *так* | *так*, *ага*, *угу*, *еге*, and *да* in many regions |  |
| reply to thanks | *будь ласка* | *нема за що*, *на здоров'я* |  |

The border between the second and third layers moves. *Да* is the clearest case: Hentschel (2023, `hentschel-2023-surzhyk-lexicon`) finds it almost consistently instead of *так* in the surzhyk corpus, and notes that it also exists in central Ukrainian dialects; Mova's dictionary records the operator's decision that everyday spoken Ukrainian now accepts it beside *так*, while written Ukrainian has *так*. The parliamentary annotators, by contrast, mark *да* `BadStyle=Yes` (18 tokens, see §6). Both judgements are true of their layer.

## 4. The styles of speech as deltas

The Ukrainian school tradition names seven functional styles (*стилі мовлення*): colloquial (*розмовний*), literary-artistic (*художній*), scientific (*науковий*), journalistic (*публіцистичний*), official (*офіційно-діловий*), religious (*конфесійний*) and epistolary (*епістолярний*). This manual adds **song** (§8) and **slang** as styles of their own. Each is listed as a delta.

### 4.1 Official and legal (*офіційно-діловий*)

| Δ | over the neutral literary standard | example |
| --- | --- | --- |
| grammar | verbal nouns in *-ння*, *-ття* instead of finite clauses; *-но/-то* forms with an accusative object; *є* + instrumental predicate; long chains of genitives; the imperative replaced by the infinitive or *слід/необхідно* + infinitive; first person of performatives (*прошу*, *наказую*, *ухвалюю*) | *Забезпечити виконання рішення.* 'Ensure the decision is executed.' *Рішення ухвалено.* 'The decision has been adopted.' |
| lexicon | fixed prepositional formulas (*відповідно до*, *згідно з*, *у разі*, *з метою*, *щодо*); terms; *зазначений*, *вищевказаний*; capitalised *Ви* | *Прошу надати мені відпустку…* 'I request leave…' |
| orthography | capitals for institutions and documents; abbreviations (*ст.*, *п.*, *млн*); numbers in figures |  |

Smerechynskyi (1932, `smerechynskyi-1932-narysy-z-ukrainskoi-syntaksy`, chs. XVIII, XXI) devotes two chapters to the verbal noun and argues that the folk language prefers a finite verb where the chancellery writes a verbal noun; the official style is in this sense a delta that the purist tradition sought to shrink. It has not shrunk: verbal nouns are 44.5 per 1 000 words in the parliamentary treebank against 24.8 in the mixed-genre IU treebank (§5).

### 4.2 Scientific and journalistic

The scientific style is the neutral standard plus terminology, *-но/-то* and passive participles, the authorial *ми* 'we', and a high share of genitive chains; the journalistic style adds evaluative words, rhetorical questions, quotations and, since 2022, a large military and volunteer vocabulary (§6). Both follow the current orthography closely, because editors do: the *проєкт* row of §2 is a journalistic fact.

### 4.3 Colloquial (*розмовний*)

The delta of §3, plus: frequent first and second person, imperatives, the vocative, interjections and discourse markers, dropped subjects, word order driven by emphasis, diminutives, and short syntactic units. The parliamentary transcripts give a measured colloquial component inside a formal setting (§5).

### 4.4 Slang (youth, internet, army)

| Δ | example | remark |
| --- | --- | --- |
| lexicon from English, with Ukrainian morphology | *крінж* 'cringe', *вайб* 'vibe', *хайп*, *фейк*, *рофл*, *краш*; verbs in *-ити/-увати*: *донатити* 'to donate', *хайпувати* | nouns take Ukrainian endings (*фейку*, *фейками*); 2018 → 2024 news: *хайп-* 5 → 67, *вайб-* 5 → 37 |
| lexicon of the war | *дрон* 'drone', *арта* 'artillery', *двохсотий* 'killed' and *трьохсотий* 'wounded' (from the military codes "cargo 200/300"), *рашист*, *орк* | *дрон-* 169 → 10 279 in the news samples, *рашист-* 9 → 305 |
| clipping and suffixes | *універ*, *комп*, *норм* 'OK', *дякс* 'thanks' |  |
| Russian-origin slang with stylistic weight | *кайф*, *прикол*, *тусовка* | long assimilated; some were russianisms and are now simply slang |

### 4.5 Literary and archaic

Literary Ukrainian keeps the full range of the language: dialect words in character speech, archaic forms for period and solemnity (*сей* 'this', *отрок*, *глаголати*), Church Slavonic vocabulary in religious and elevated texts, and the deliberately mixed speech of characters. A literary text is often a stack of labels: narration in the standard, dialogue in a dialect or in surzhyk.

## 5. Register as co-occurring features in the treebanks

The two UD treebanks are a small register laboratory: IU is a mixture of fiction, news, opinion, Wikipedia, legal texts, letters, posts and comments; ParlaMint is spontaneous and prepared speech in parliament, 2003–2022. Rates per 1 000 syntactic words (without punctuation), all splits, 2026-11-06:

| feature | IU (99 495 words) | ParlaMint (89 858 words) | reading |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| finite verbs in the 1st or 2nd person | 11.6 | 41.7 | speech addresses and speaks for someone |
| vocative (`vocative`) | 1.03 | 8.45 | address: *колего*, *пане Голово* |
| imperatives (`Mood=Imp`) | 3.0 | 10.2 | procedure: *Голосуйте!*, *Підготуйтеся* |
| `Polite=Form` (polite *Ви* and its verbs) | — | 2.1 (190 tokens) | only ParlaMint annotates it |
| repairs (`reparandum`) | 0.01 | 1.01 | unplanned speech |
| verbal nouns in *-ння/-ття* | 24.8 | 44.5 | the official and legislative style |
| *-но/-то* forms (`Person=0`) | 1.98 | 3.36 | official formulas of results: *рішення прийнято* |
| conditional *би/б* | 1.35 | 2.35 | proposals and hedges |
| converbs (`VerbForm=Conv`) | 4.30 | 1.78 | a mark of writing (fiction, news) |
| passive participles | 12.5 | 10.2 | close: both registers use them |
| `discourse` relation | 23.3 | 8.8 | not comparable: IU tags many particles (*й*, *то*, *навіть*) as `discourse`, ParlaMint does not (chapter 30) |
| `Foreign=Yes` | 5.98 | 1.11 | IU's foreign words are quotations and names; ParlaMint's are Russian fragments that survived the selection (§7.6) |

Parliamentary Ukrainian is thus a stack of two styles: the official style in its lexicon and nominal syntax (verbal nouns, *-но/-то*) and the colloquial style in its person, address, imperatives and repairs. The UD Ukrainian ParlaMint paper (Shvedova, Lukashevskyi & Rysin 2025, `shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian`) describes the material in the same terms: real speech with elements of colloquial syntax, grammatical inconsistencies and lexical errors, selected from 2003–2022 because earlier transcripts were partly corrected and later ones are over-normalised by speech recognition, which replaces vernacular words such as *щас* with *зараз*. A normalising transcript erases exactly the deltas this chapter describes.

## 6. Russianisms and anglicisms, judged by measured usage

A russianism is a word, form or construction taken from Russian, or calqued on it, where Ukrainian has its own. The purist tradition (Syniavskyi 1922, Smerechynskyi 1932, Antonenko-Davydovych later) listed them; electronic tools now flag them: VESUM marks over 9 300 single-word russianisms with suggested replacements, and the LanguageTool module built on it checks texts for them (Starko & Rysin 2025, `starko-2025-dictionary-derussification`, CC BY-SA, paraphrased). In the VESUM file Mova holds (`dict_corp_vis.txt.bz2`), 13 898 lemma lines carry the tag `bad` (non-normative), beside `arch` 9 528, `slang` 4 071, `alt` 1 465 (alternative spelling), `obsc` 762 and `vulg` 358 (counted 2026-11-06; VESUM is CC BY-NC-SA, counts only).

This manual describes a russianism by three numbers rather than by a verdict: how often it occurs, in what register, and in which direction its frequency moves. The parliamentary annotators mark non-normative forms `BadStyle=Yes`; their 309 tokens are a profile of what is non-normative in spoken official Ukrainian:

| class (ParlaMint `BadStyle=Yes`, 309 tokens) | tokens | examples | normative |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| active participles in *-учий/-ючий/-ачий/-ячий* | 87 | *існуючий*, *діючий*, *головуючий*, *виступаючий*, *контролюючий* | *чинний*, *наявний*, *головувач*/*головуючий* (the last is the parliament's own term), *промовець* |
| *їх* as a possessive | 37 | *їх пропозиції* | *їхні пропозиції* |
| *да* 'yes' | 18 | *да?* as a tag | *так?* |
| *грунт* without *ґ* | 11 | *обгрунтований* | *обґрунтований* |
| Russian words in Ukrainian speech | dozens of single items | *уровня*, *топлива*, *также*, *хорошо*, *схватка*, *скважина* | *рівня*, *палива*, *також*, *добре*, *сутичка*, *свердловина* |
| calqued forms | single items | *являється* 'is', *співпадати*, *заключний*, *слідуючий* | *є*, *збігатися*, *заключний*/*підсумковий*, *наступний* |

The news samples measure the movement of the commonest ones between 2018 and 2024 (occurrences; the *являється* row subtracts *з'являється* 'appears', which is normative):

| non-normative or disputed | 2018 | 2024 | normative competitor | 2018 | 2024 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *існуючий*, *існуючих* | 229 | 87 | *чинний*, *чинних* | 328 | 335 |
| *являється*, *являються* 'is, are' | 414 | 407 | (*є*) |  |  |
| *приймати участь* | 11 | 5 | *брати участь* | 583 | 400 |
| *на протязі* | 20 | 5 | *протягом* | 4 308 | 5 798 |
| *так як* 'since' | 275 | 80 | *оскільки* | 4 005 | 5 769 |
| *по відношенню до* | 162 | 114 | *щодо* | 14 405 | 14 081 |
| *їх* (all uses, incl. the correct object pronoun) | 16 733 | 14 799 | *їхній, їхні, їхня, їхнє* | 3 994 | 5 454 |
| *слідуючий* | 1 | 2 | *наступний* | 769 | 704 |

The movement is consistent: the forms the purist and normative tradition objected to fall, sometimes sharply (*так як* by 71%, *існуючий* by 62%), and their competitors rise. *Являється* in the sense 'is' is the exception: steady at about 400 in a million sentences of news. The shift is not a dictionary's decision; it is what editors and writers did in six years, and it follows the direction of the norm.

Anglicisms enter the other way: they are new, they are taken with Ukrainian morphology at once, and the norm has little to say about them until usage settles. In the news samples: *донат-* 16 → 407, *задонат-* 0 → 87, *фейк-* 323 → 590, *хайп-* 5 → 67, *крінж-* 0 → 10, *зашквар-* (a Russian-origin slang word) 1 → 15. A neutral manual records them as the slang and journalistic lexicon delta of their years (§4.4).

## 7. Surzhyk

### 7.1 What it is

**Surzhyk** is Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech used by millions of people in central, eastern and southern Ukraine, alongside Ukrainian and, less often, Russian. The word means a mixture of grains (wheat and rye) and, by extension, of flours; as a name of speech it has a pejorative history. Its traditional form has a Ukrainian base: Ukrainian grammar and much of the Ukrainian lexicon, with Russian words, forms and sounds mixed in. It arose over many decades, at the latest from the late nineteenth century, in the rural-to-urban migration of industrialisation, when speakers of Ukrainian dialects moved into Russian-dominated towns and workplaces (Hentschel & Palinska 2022, `hentschel-2022-mesolect-infinitive`; Hentschel 2023).

Three things it is not:

| not this | how it differs |
| --- | --- |
| a dialect | a dialect is the old local form of Ukrainian (Hutsul *єк* for *як*, south-western *спав-єм* 'I slept'); surzhyk is the product of contact with Russian and has much weaker regional differences than the dialect continuum |
| code-switching | a bilingual speaker alternates sentences or clauses of Ukrainian and Russian, often for a function (quoting, addressing someone, changing tone); surzhyk mixes inside the clause, and the mixing is mostly not functional |
| Russian with Ukrainian words | that is the newer *Neo-surzhyk* of the south (§7.4); traditional surzhyk is Ukrainian at its base |

### 7.2 Surzhyk has its own norms

The common belief in Ukraine has been that the mix is random, spontaneous, even chaotic. The largest corpus study contradicts it. Hentschel and colleagues recorded about 730 000 word forms of family conversations and interviews in eleven central and three Black Sea oblasts (2010–2021), and analysed the utterances that mix both languages (Hentschel 2023, `hentschel-2023-surzhyk-lexicon`, CC BY):

- of 107 Ukrainian-Russian pairs of competing words ("hyperlexemes", nearly 103 000 tokens), 37 are realised in Ukrainian in over 80% of cases and 30 in Russian in over 80%; together these 67 pairs make up 72% of the tokens. Only 21 pairs vary freely;
- the fixations are the same across the whole surveyed territory, central and southern, and neither token frequency nor age, education or other social factors explain the choice for these stable pairs; Ukrainian and Russian lexemes are roughly balanced in number;
- the conclusion: surzhyk is developing towards a "fused lect", a lect of its own with its own lexical norms and with partly regional differences — and, the author stresses, a lect of Ukrainian, a mesolectal continuum, much as English is a Germanic language in spite of its Romance vocabulary.

The same holds for grammar. The infinitive ending was studied on about 10 000 instances (Hentschel & Palinska 2022, `hentschel-2022-mesolect-infinitive`, CC BY): the Russian-like ending *-ть* is not omnipresent in surzhyk, nor is the standard Ukrainian *-ти* peripheral. The share of *-ть* is highest in the oblasts on the borders with Russia and Belarus and in Kharkiv, where Russian was strong, even where the local dialects have mostly *-ти*; where the dialects have only *-ти* and Ukrainian always dominated, *-ти* dominates surzhyk too. The stem matters as well: a Ukrainian stem attracts *-ти*, a Russian one *-ть*. The authors read this as structure-building in a mesolect between the dialects and two competing standard languages — dialect levelling and post-colonial hybridisation in one process — and not as a random mix.

### 7.3 The deltas

The delta of traditional surzhyk over the literary standard (examples from the studies above and from the general literature; items with a share are from Hentschel 2023):

| Δ | surzhyk | standard Ukrainian | remark |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| lexicon, stable Russian | *тоже* (95% Russian in the corpus) | *теж*, *також* |  |
| lexicon, mostly Russian | *надо* (72%; *треба* 25%) | *треба*, *потрібно* |  |
| lexicon, mostly Ukrainian | *мати* 'to have' (about 4 of 5) against Russian *иметь* | *мати*, *у мене є* |  |
| lexicon, a Ukrainian word with a Russian meaning | *неділя* 'week' (about two thirds of 179 uses) | *тиждень* 'week'; *неділя* 'Sunday' | a false friend fixed in surzhyk |
| lexicon, common items | *канєшно*, *вобщем*, *ладно*, *тіпа*, *щас*, *всьо*, *пасіба* | *звісно*, *загалом*, *гаразд*, *типу*/*ніби*, *зараз*, *усе*, *дякую* |  |
| particles | *да* – *не* as the yes–no pair | *так* – *ні* | as in Belarusian-Russian *trasianka* |
| morphology | infinitive *-ть* beside *-ти* (*сказать*, *робить*) | *-ти* | regional and stem-dependent (§7.2) |
| morphology | Russian endings on Ukrainian stems and the reverse; Russian participles in *-ущий/-ючий* | Ukrainian endings; relative clauses |  |
| syntax, government | *по ділу*, *по любому*, *згідно чого*, *бути правим* | *у справі*, *хай там як*, *згідно з чим*, *мати рацію* | Russian government and phrasing |
| pronunciation | Russian unstressed vowel reduction (*кароче*, *гавариш*); *шо*; Russian *е* without softening | Ukrainian full vowels | spelt by writers who stylise surzhyk |
| mixed formulas | *Дай Бог здоровля*, *Ну шо, як діла?* | *Дай Боже здоров'я*, *Ну що, як справи?* |  |

### 7.4 Where it lives and who speaks it

- **Region.** Central Ukraine (the traditional Ukrainian dialect area, with Ukrainian-based surzhyk almost everywhere), the east and the south. In the south (Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson), where there was no old dialect base and Ukrainian and Russian settlers arrived together from the nineteenth century, a Russian-based mixed speech, **Neo-surzhyk**, is expected; the researchers doubt that three decades since 1991 suffice for it to stabilise as a variety (Hentschel 2023 § 2).
- **Setting.** The family and close acquaintances; villages and small towns rather than metropoles. For strangers, people use one of the standard languages; regular surzhyk speakers usually command one standard well.
- **How common.** In a survey of 1 200 respondents in the three Black Sea oblasts in 2020–2021, before the full-scale invasion, surzhyk was about as common as Ukrainian or Russian as the code of childhood, and about half the respondents still used it often as adults, though rarely as their only code (Hentschel & Palinska 2022, `hentschel-2022-black-sea-surzhyk`, CC BY). The same survey found that ethnic Ukrainians there named Ukrainian as their native language far more often than in the censuses of 1989 and 2001 — up to nine in ten — while their daily practice changed much more slowly.

### 7.5 Its social meaning

Surzhyk has been stigmatised by the national-oriented elites and by many linguists as a post-colonial legacy of Russification, while the general population's attitude to it was relatively relaxed (Hentschel 2023 § 5). Its meanings in use:

| use | meaning |
| --- | --- |
| the home code of a rural or small-town speaker | identity, warmth, belonging; not a choice for the speaker |
| stylised in fiction and on stage | social characterisation: the villager in town, the newcomer, the older relative; comic or tender |
| a comic persona in popular culture | humour and affection: the stage persona Verka Serduchka (from the 1990s) built a nationwide figure on surzhyk songs and patter |
| on social media | irony at pretension, self-irony, or simply how the writer speaks |
| quoted by a standard speaker | distance, mockery, or play |

After February 2022 attitudes to Russian changed sharply for many Ukrainians, and with internal displacement the linguistic situation is changing; the researchers expect surzhyk to change too, and possibly to become more Ukrainian (Hentschel 2023 § 5). Any count of surzhyk made before 2022 describes a situation that has since moved.

### 7.6 Surzhyk in the corpora Mova holds

- **Reference corpora exclude it.** A standard-oriented corpus such as GRAC meets surzhyk mostly as isolated, stylised elements: in characters' speech, word play, linguistic examples (Shvedova & von Waldenfels 2021, `shvedova-2021-grac-regional`).
- **UD_Ukrainian-ParlaMint** removed text with Ukrainian-Russian code-switching and some Russian sentences when it was built; what remains is a trace: 100 `Foreign=Yes` tokens, Russian fragments such as *что*, *вы*, *будете*, *на русском языке*, and the 309 `BadStyle` tokens of §6.
- **The parliamentary code-switching corpus** (Kanishcheva et al. 2023, `kanishcheva-2023-parliamentary-code-switching-corpus-bilingualism`, CC BY) marks the language of each sentence in the Rada's transcripts from 1990 to 2020: the share of Ukrainian grows over the convocations and reaches 100% in 2018; switching is used, among other things, to mark quoted speech, and in some factions code-switchers outnumbered Ukrainian speakers (77 against 63 in the Party of Regions in the sixth convocation).
- **The Oldenburg surzhyk corpus** of the studies above is not in Mova's data.

## 8. Song lyrics: a style with its own grammar

A song is a style of speech in its own right. Its text is shaped by a tune before it is shaped by the grammar: the line has a fixed number of sung syllables, it ends on a rhyme or an assonance, its stresses fall on the beats, and it is learnt by heart and sung by many voices for generations. Lyrics therefore depart from the written norm routinely and without being errors, in every period and genre — the folk song, the literary romance, the popular song, rock and rap. In songs, **surzhyk is not that problematic**: a dialect form, a Russian word or a mixed line is a resource of the style, chosen for rhyme, metre, character or humour, and a song in surzhyk is judged as a song. This is why *song* is a separate style value and not a kind of colloquial.

The examples below are from folk songs and from authors dead more than seventy years (Shevchenko †1861, Starytsky †1904, Kotliarevsky †1838), all public domain; copyrighted lyrics are not quoted.

### 8.1 The folk-song delta

| Δ | folk song | prose |
| --- | --- | --- |
| short (nominal) adjectives | *зелен гай*, *ясен місяць*, *дрібен дощик*, *повен місяць* | *зелений гай*, *ясний місяць* |
| long uncontracted adjectives and demonstratives | *Стоїть гора високая* 'There stands a high mountain'; *А ми тую червону калину підіймемо* 'And we shall raise that red guelder rose' (*Ой у лузі червона калина*); *Ніч яка місячна, зоряна, ясная!* (Starytsky) | *висока*, *ту*, *ясна* |
| truncated present | *Сердитий вітер завива* 'The angry wind howls'; *Горами хвилю підійма* 'raises the wave mountain-high' (Shevchenko, *Причинна*, 1837) | *завиває*, *підіймає* |
| truncated nouns for the metre | *Реве та стогне Дніпр широкий* 'The broad Dnipro roars and moans' (ibid.) | *Дніпро* |
| infinitive in *-ть* for rhyme | *Та лягайте спочивать*, *В сад криниченьку копать* (*Розпрягайте, хлопці, коні*) | *спочивати*, *копати* |
| animate accusative plural = nominative | *Розпрягайте, хлопці, коні* 'Unharness the horses, lads' | *коней* |
| diminutives in chains | *криниченька*, *місяченько*, *густесенький* 'very dense', *рученьки* | expressive, not small in size |
| vocatives and address to nature | *Ой ти, місяцю*, *Ой не світи, місяченьку*, *Дівчино моя* |  |
| filler particles and interjections for the metre | *ой*, *гей*, *та*: *Ой на горі та женці жнуть* 'Oh, on the hill the reapers reap' | *На горі женці жнуть* |
| fronted and separated adjectives (hyperbaton) | *Додолу верби гне високі* 'bends the tall willows to the ground' (Shevchenko) | *гне високі верби додолу* |
| psychological parallelism: a nature image, then the human situation | *Ой у лузі червона калина похилилася, / Чогось наша славна Україна зажурилася* |  |
| repetition and refrains | *яром-долиною*, *гей, гей* |  |

A folk song in a modern songbook is usually spelt in the standard orthography; the grammar deltas stay. For a parser they produce rare or non-projective attachments (a separated adjective across its verb, an apparently nominative object, a truncated verb with no lemma in the dictionary), and a model trained on news may defeat itself on one line. Word order in songs and poetry is described further in [chapter 29](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/).

### 8.2 The literary and burlesque tradition

Modern literary Ukrainian begins in verse with Kotliarevsky's burlesque *Енеїда* (1798), written in the vernacular of the Poltava region: *Еней був парубок моторний / І хлопець хоть куди козак* 'Aeneas was a lively lad, and a fine Cossack of a fellow' — with *хоть* where the later standard has *хоч*. Shevchenko's poems became songs (*Реве та стогне Дніпр широкий*; *Тече вода в синє море*), and the songs kept his forms. The literary song thus carries into the present forms that prose abandoned in the nineteenth century, and its listeners do not perceive them as errors or as archaisms, but as song: a clear instance of the conservative side of §2.

### 8.3 The popular song and surzhyk

Popular song since the 1990s takes the colloquial deltas of §3 as its norm, and part of it takes surzhyk as its persona: the comic stage figure who sings in mixed speech, the town song with Russian words for rhyme, the rock song in a regional voice. Here surzhyk is a deliberate stylistic layer, recognised by the audience as such, and it is precisely the song that has kept surzhyk's warm and humorous meaning alive beside its stigma (§7.5). Since 2022 many performers have moved to Ukrainian or re-recorded Russian songs in Ukrainian; mixed lines remain as a comic and characterising device.

### 8.4 Rap

Ukrainian rap adds: English borrowings with Ukrainian morphology (§4.4), slang and army words, internal rhymes and assonance that drive the choice of words, enjambment across lines, and colloquial pronunciation written out (*шо*, *ща*). Its word order is mostly that of speech; its deltas are in the lexicon and the sound.

### 8.5 Lyrics as data

- **The unit is the line, not the sentence.** Lyrics are written one musical phrase per line, often without final punctuation; a sentence runs over lines or a line holds two.
- **The spelling is the transcriber's.** Dialect, surzhyk and colloquial forms are spelt differently by every site; the same song exists with *шо* and *що*.
- **Rights.** Folk songs and the songs of authors dead more than seventy years are public domain; almost all modern lyrics are copyrighted. A song corpus that can be built into Mova is a corpus of the former; modern songs can be counted and tested on only, under [Data and model licences](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/licence/DATA/). No Ukrainian song corpus is configured on 2026-11-06.

## 9. The dialect modifier

The dialects themselves are described in [chapter 8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/). Ukrainian dialectology divides them into three groups (*наріччя*): **northern** (Polissian), **south-western** (Volhynian-Podillian, Galician-Bukovinian, and the Carpathian dialects: Hutsul, Boyko, Lemko, Transcarpathian) and **south-eastern** (Middle Dnieper, Slobozhan, Steppe). The standard is based mainly on the south-eastern dialects, with a strong south-western contribution through the Galician literary tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

### 9.1 Deltas of some dialects

| variety | grammar Δ | lexicon Δ | sound and spelling Δ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Hutsul (Carpathians) | special case endings; preserved dual forms (*дві яблуці* 'two apples'); person clitics on the past (*спав-єм*); more dropped subject pronouns | Romanian, Polish and German borrowings (*бринза* 'sheep cheese', *шпацірувати* 'to stroll'); *ґазда* 'master of the house' | *є* for *а/я* after soft consonants (*єк* for *як*, *єгода* for *ягода*) (Kyslyi et al. 2025, `kyslyi-2025-vuyko-mistral-adapting-llms-low`) |
| south-western (Galician, Bukovinian) | past with person clitics (*ходив-єм* "I (m.) went", *ходила-м* "I (f.) went", *були-сьмо* "we were") and fewer subject pronouns (Fellerer 2022, `fellerer-2022-pro-drop-sw`; chapter 35); dative *-ови* | Polish and German borrowings: *файний* 'fine', *фіранка* 'curtain', *газда*, *когут* 'rooster', *кобіта* 'woman' | *від* rather than *од* |
| Polissian (north) | diphthongs; *од* for *від* | *бульба* 'potato' (also Belarusian) |  |
| Slobozhan and Steppe (east, south) | close to the standard; Russian contact strongest |  | *шо* |
| Transcarpathian | archaic and Hungarian-influenced forms | *крумплі* 'potato' (Hungarian) |  |
| diaspora (North America, Western Europe) | borrowed nouns in *-о* declined more often, the 1928 forms | older and Galician lexicon; local borrowings | the 1928 orthography: *матеріял*, *Европа*, *инший*, *смерти* |

GRAC, the large reference corpus with a regional layer, shows how these deltas survive in written standard-oriented texts (Shvedova & von Waldenfels 2021, `shvedova-2021-grac-regional`): for 'potato', the standard *картопля* dominates writing everywhere, but northern texts have a notable share of *бульба* and western texts *мандибурка* and *крумплі*, matching the dialect atlas; *від* against *од* (1 759 355 against 85 598 uses) is nearly exclusive in western texts, while *од* was much commoner elsewhere before the Soviet standardisation of the 1930s; and authors in the diaspora decline borrowed nouns in *-o* more often than authors in Ukraine. A stylometric study of the same corpus found that pre-war western and eastern standard texts are clearly distinct and post-war ones converge, with a sharper break in the west; some western features (wider uses of *при*, *перед*) were lost, others kept (Lahjouji-Seppälä, Rabus & von Waldenfels 2022, `lahjouji-2022-standard-variants`).

The IU treebank keeps the diaspora and pre-war spelling and marks it `Orth=Alt`: 129 tokens, such as *пів* (23), *матеріял* and its forms, *большевицький*, *Европи*, *инший*, *смерти*, *спеціяльний*, *лавреат*. These are the orthography delta of the 1928 standard over 2019, in measured form.

### 9.2 Values of the modifier

Ukrainian has no ISO 639 or BCP 47 subtags for its dialects; the dialect modifier is therefore a short name. The values this manual proposes: `polissia`, `volhynia`, `podillia`, `galicia`, `bukovyna`, `hutsul`, `boyko`, `lemko`, `transcarpathia`, `middle-dnieper`, `slobozhan`, `steppe`, `diaspora`, and, for the mixed varieties, `surzhyk` and `neo-surzhyk`. A region subtag (`UA`, `CA`, `US`) can narrow the diaspora where it matters.

## 10. Norms, orthographies and house styles

| norm | status | delta over 2019 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *Український правопис* 2019 | current (Cabinet resolution No. 437 of 22 May 2019) | — |
| 1990 edition | previous; restored *ґ* | *проект*, no *-ости* variants, fewer feminitive rules |
| 1928 ("Kharkiv", Skrypnyk) orthography | kept in much of the diaspora | *Европа*, *инший* at the start of a word, *-іял* for *-іал* in borrowings (*матеріял*), *-ости* genitive, *Атени*, *міт*, *ґ* in borrowings |
| a newspaper's or broadcaster's style book | house rules over the 2019 code | choices among the 2019 variants, feminitives, capitals, numerals |

The 2019 orthography codifies variation openly. Among its variants (`ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019`): the genitive singular of third-declension nouns in *-ть* after a consonant and of *кров*, *любов*, *осінь*, *сіль*, *Русь*, *Білорусь* may take *-и* beside *-і* (*радости/радості*, *смерти*, *любови*, *осени*; § 95); in words of Greek origin used with *ф*, *т* is allowed: *ефір/етер*, *кафедра/катедра*, *міф/міт*, *Афіни/Атени*, *Марфа/Марта* (§ 123); feminine role nouns are formed with listed suffixes (§ 32.4). The news counts of §2 show what usage made of them by 2024: *проєкт* (obligatory) was taken up; the optional old variants were not. A house style choosing between the variants is a style label (`norm:2019`, `norm:1928`, `house:<name>`), not a dialect.

## 11. How Mova handles it

### 11.1 What exists

- **The Ukrainian fact extractor** (`kg`, [`kg/src/uk.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/), [kg — the Mova knowledge graph](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/)) reads simple Ukrainian sentences with VESUM morphology. It loads VESUM's analyses through [`kg/src/morph.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/) and packs them into the compact grammar of [`kg/src/gram.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/) (part of speech, case, number, gender, person, tense, aspect, animacy, degree, and the flags pronoun, proper name, negation, implicit member). VESUM's style tags (`bad`, `arch`, `slang`, `alt`, `obsc`, `vulg`) are not carried into the grammar: a non-normative form and its normative competitor give the same fact. `kg` therefore reads *існуючий закон* and *чинний закон* alike, and has no notion of register.
- **Mova's dictionaries** record register decisions for Ukrainian words in their definitions: the pupils' dictionary states that written Ukrainian has *так* for 'yes' and everyday spoken Ukrainian accepts both *так* and *да* (`world/data/school/dictionary/2428-da.lesson`, commit `95742508b`, 2026-10-22). This is a fact taught to the pupil, not a rule applied to text.
- **The multilingual parser** (`tools/mova-parse`, [README](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/tools/mova-parse/)) writes a label of (language, dialect, style) on every sentence. Its level 1, `langseg`, segments Latin-script languages only (English and French on 2026-11-06); its dialect detector `langseg::variety` knows `US`/`GB`/`CA` for English and `FR`/`CA`/`BE`/`CH` for French; no style tagger is implemented. Ukrainian, in Cyrillic, is not segmented, has no model file, and gets no dialect or style.
- **The Eel's condition.** On the Eel's French branch (`eel-fr`, not merged into `main` on 2026-11-06), an autoencoder round may carry a condition `{"language", "dialect", "style"}` whose values are checked for shape only; `{"language": "uk", "dialect": "hutsul", "style": "song:folk"}` would pass the check. The condition keeps tables of different conditions apart; it does not detect a dialect or a style and does not change the parser. No Ukrainian round exists.
- **Register statistics.** `world register-stats` ([`world/src/register.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/world/)) compares a register corpus with a reference corpus by log-odds; its tokenizer splits on non-alphabetic characters and lowercases, so it would run on Cyrillic text unchanged. The register lexicons compiled into `global` (`register-legal.tsv`, `register-tale.tsv`, `register-children.tsv`) are English. No Ukrainian register lexicon exists; an official-style lexicon from Ukrainian laws (public texts) against Ukrainian news would be the obvious first one.
- **Pragmatic labels** ([`prag/src/schema.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/prag/)) have no register field and read English only (chapter 30).

### 11.2 What the counts of this chapter could become

Every rate of §5 is read from a UD tree with no lexicon: person, vocative, imperative, `Polite=Form`, repairs, verbal nouns by suffix, `Person=0`, converbs. The lexical deltas of §§6–7 are VESUM's style tags and a few dozen hyperlexemes. Together they would give a Ukrainian register and variety score per document — official against colloquial from the trees, normative against non-normative from the VESUM tags, the 1928 orthography from `Orth=Alt`-type spellings, surzhyk from the hyperlexemes of Hentschel (2023). They are counted here by hand on gold trees and on news text; Mova computes none of them.

### 11.3 Not there yet

- No Ukrainian parser model, no Cyrillic segmentation in `langseg`, no Ukrainian dialect or style detection.
- No use of VESUM's style tags in `kg`; no register distinction in facts.
- No Ukrainian register lexicon; no Ukrainian pragmatic labels.
- No surzhyk lexicon or detector; no model of the delta tables of §§3–9.
- No song corpus and no song-conditioned processing: `song:folk` is a valid style value with nothing behind it yet.
- No normalisation layer for dialect, surzhyk or old-orthography spellings.

## In Mova

- Ukrainian facts: [`kg/src/uk.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/), [`kg/src/morph.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/), [`kg/src/gram.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/), [kg — the Mova knowledge graph](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/).
- The label of a text: [mova-parse](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/tools/mova-parse/), [langseg](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/tools/langseg/); the Eel's condition on the `eel-fr` branch (`tools/eel/src/autoencoder.rs`, `fn condition`).
- Register lexicons: [`world/src/register.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/world/), `global/data/register-*.tsv`.
- Sentence labels: [`prag/src/schema.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/prag/).
- The French counterpart (when merged): [37. Register and variation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/37-register-and-variation/); the English: [37. Register and variation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/37-register-and-variation/).

## 12. Sources

- *Український правопис*. 2019. Approved by Cabinet of Ministers resolution No. 437 of 22 May 2019. Preface (pp. 2–5), § 32.4 (feminine role nouns), § 95 (genitive variants in *-и*), § 123 (*th* as *ф* or *т*). `ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019` (official document, not under copyright)
- Smerechynskyi, S. 1932. *Нариси з української синтакси*. Chs. XVIII and XXI (verbal nouns). `smerechynskyi-1932-narysy-z-ukrainskoi-syntaksy` (public domain in UA/EU)
- Hentschel, G. 2023. Ukrainian and Russian in the lexicon of Ukrainian Suržyk: reduced variation and stabilisation in central Ukraine and on the Black Sea coast. *Russian Linguistics* 48(1). `hentschel-2023-surzhyk-lexicon` (CC BY 4.0)
- Hentschel, G., Palinska, O. 2022. Restructuring in a Mesolect: A Case Study on the Basis of the Formal Variation of the Infinitive in Ukrainian–Russian Surzhyk. *Cognitive Studies | Études cognitives* 22. `hentschel-2022-mesolect-infinitive` (CC BY 4.0)
- Hentschel, G., Palinska, O. 2022. The linguistic situation on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast – Ukrainian, Russian and Suržyk as "native language", "primary code", frequently used codes and codes of self-identification. *Russian Linguistics* 46(3). `hentschel-2022-black-sea-surzhyk` (CC BY 4.0)
- Kanishcheva, O., Kovalova, T., Shvedova, M., von Waldenfels, R. 2023. The Parliamentary Code-Switching Corpus: Bilingualism in the Ukrainian Parliament in the 1990s–2020s. UNLP 2023. `kanishcheva-2023-parliamentary-code-switching-corpus-bilingualism` (CC BY 4.0)
- Shvedova, M., von Waldenfels, R. 2021. Regional Annotation within GRAC, a Large Reference Corpus of Ukrainian: Issues and Challenges. COLINS 2021. `shvedova-2021-grac-regional` (CC BY 4.0)
- Lahjouji-Seppälä, M., Rabus, A., von Waldenfels, R. 2022. Ukrainian standard variants in the 20th century: stylometry to the rescue. *Russian Linguistics*. `lahjouji-2022-standard-variants` (CC BY 4.0)
- Shvedova, M., Lukashevskyi, A., Rysin, A. 2025. Developing a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Ukrainian Parliamentary Speech. UNLP 2025. `shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian` (CC BY 4.0)
- Starko, V., Rysin, A. 2025. An Electronic Ukrainian Dictionary as a Derussification Tool. eLex 2025. `starko-2025-dictionary-derussification` (CC BY-SA 4.0; paraphrased, not quoted)
- Synchak, O., Starko, V. 2022. Ukrainian Feminine Personal Nouns in Online Dictionaries and Corpora. COLINS 2022. `synchak-2022-feminine-dictionaries` (CC BY 4.0)
- Synchak, O. 2023. Military Feminine Personal Nouns: A Corpus-Based Update to the Web Dictionary of Ukrainian Feminine Personal Nouns. eLex 2023. `synchak-2023-military-feminine` (CC BY-SA 4.0; paraphrased, not quoted)
- Kunch, Z., Lytvyn, O., Mentynska, I. 2023. Modern Ukrainian Electronic Dictionaries: the Problem of Implementing Spelling Changes. `kunch-2023-e-dictionaries-spelling` (CC BY 4.0)
- Kyslyi, R., Maksymiuk, Y., Pysmennyi, I. 2025. Vuyko Mistral: Adapting LLMs for Low-Resource Dialectal Translation. UNLP 2025. `kyslyi-2025-vuyko-mistral-adapting-llms-low` (CC BY 4.0)
- Fellerer, J. 2022. Subject pro-drop and past-tense auxiliary clitics in South-Western Ukrainian. *Russian Linguistics* 46(3). `fellerer-2022-pro-drop-sw` (CC BY 4.0)
- Songs and verse in the public domain: folk songs (*Ой у лузі червона калина*, *Ой на горі та женці жнуть*, *Розпрягайте, хлопці, коні*, *Стоїть гора високая*); T. Shevchenko, *Причинна* (1837); M. Starytsky, *Ніч яка місячна*; I. Kotliarevsky, *Енеїда* (1798).
- Wanted (not in the library): a published statement of the Institute of the Ukrainian Language on norm and usage; the Oldenburg surzhyk corpus; Antonenko-Davydovych, *Як ми говоримо*; the *Атлас української мови*; a modern dialectology handbook (Zhylko; Bevzenko).
- Data: UD_Ukrainian-IU 2.18 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; counts only) and UD_Ukrainian-ParlaMint 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0; quoted by `sent_id`), all splits, counted 2026-11-06; Leipzig Corpora Collection *ukr_newscrawl_2018* and *ukr_news_2024*, 1 M sentences each (CC BY; Goldhahn, Eckart & Quasthoff 2012), counted 2026-11-06; VESUM `dict_corp_vis.txt.bz2` (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; tag counts only).
- [← previous 36. Discourse relations](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/36-discourse-relations/)
- [next → 38. Dialogue and discourse markers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/)
- [↑ back to Ukrainian: a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/)