You're reading: Harvard’s Flier: Ukrainian as ‘linguistic battleground’

Michael Flier is the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. His research interests include Slavic linguistics and semiotics of medieval East-Slavic culture. In this Kyiv Post interview, Flier speaks of the structure and development of Ukrainian language and specifically of surzhyk. He shares his own research experience in the field and emphasizes the necessity of Ukrainian being the state language.

Kyiv Post: You have received your B.A., M.A. and Ph.D from University of California at Berkeley. Do you mind sharing more about your academic background and how your interest in Slavic culture has evolved during your formative years until present?

Michael Flier: I went to Berkeley and the original intention was
to become
a doctor,
a
lawyer or a dentist (laughs). But what I really loved was foreign languages. I decided to sign up for Russian, and it was a wonderful experience. I completely fell in love with
the language and the alphabet. In graduate school I specialized in Slavic linguistics and
was drawn to Old Church Slavonic, on which I wrote my dissertation. My first job was at the University
of California
at Los Angeles.

What I soon discovered was that you couldn’t really
understand the development of East Slavic without knowing Ukrainian. There was just so much important history that
you missed if you only concentrated on Russian. I was especially intrigued by the way sound
change affects
morphology, and Ukrainian has fascinating
data for that. If you simply compare the various Ukrainian dialects, the kinds of
changes they demonstrate, why they diverge and when, you gain an appreciation for the rich complexity of linguistic
structure and context. Add data from Belarusian and Russian and you receive an even
deeper understanding of the effects of sound change on morphological form
across space and time.

Kyiv Post: Do you mind sharing a little more about the summer program that you teach?

MF: Coming to Harvard in 1991, I had the
opportunity to participate in the annual Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. I thought it would be
wonderful to teach an intensive course about the territory of Ukraine as a linguistic battleground in which one could
trace the development of Ukrainian against the ever-present background of Russian,
Polish, and Church Slavonic. The students in the course come primarily from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Often half of them
come from Ukraine, but, despite that fact, they don’t always have a very clear notion of how Ukrainian
developed.
Some have heard Russian nationalist accounts that tell
them that Ukrainian isn’t a language at all, but a dialect of Russian and they don’t know how to
respond;
they
don’t know some of the major structural differences
that must be considered when discussing such linguistic matters. Looking at the
sound systems alone, one can appreciate the profound difference between
Ukrainian on the one hand and both Belarusian and Russian on the other.

Kyiv Post: You have had a special interest on the Ukrainian-Russian hybrid dialect surzhyk. You have written articles on this topic including “Surzhyk: The Rules of Engagement.” Could you please tell in more detail what stimulated such an interest?

MF: I began to read about this language
called surzhyk, it wasn’t even called a language; it was called disorganized artificial speech or something of
that sort.
Depending on the author, you can get very different adjectives to describe
it. But the fact is that Ukrainian and Russian are two languages, genetically related, and yet one can
have an effect on the other. When you read the descriptions of surzhyk, you learn that
the word itself is originally derived from a collocation that meant “impure wheat,”
wheat that usually had an admixture of some other grain like rye or barley; in other words “not quite right, not quite normal, impure.” Some said that surzhyk was
actually a chaotic linguistic mixture, an arbitrary hybrid with no rhyme or reason. Coming from a background in linguistics I knew that
languages just don’t work that way. All languages definitely have structure and rules. There had to be a way in
which we might better understand how Russian could affect Ukrainian and according to
what hierarchies those effects
were produced.

Kyiv Post: Laada Bilaniuk proposes a historical geographic typology of surzhyk that distinguishes preliminary five basic types: urbanized-peasant, village-dialect, Sovietized Ukrainian etc. Do you agree with such a division?

MF: I have great
respect for Laada Bilaniuk’s work on the language situation in Ukraine. But in her recent book, she proposed a
typology of different surzhyks on Ukrainian territory. When I first read that, it did not sound quite right to me. If the basic
structures of Ukrainian and Russian interact, the principles of that interaction ought to be the same. Whatever differences
arise in time and space are primarily contextual. I took each one of her
different types and, understanding them to be primarily social, chronological,
and/or geographical in nature, tried to show structurally they were one and the
same. The major differences, understandably, were represented in the lexicon. So naturally in the Soviet period you are going to find more
Soviet Russian terms coming in, but does that really mean that Sovietized surzhyk is structurally different
from post-Independence surzhyk or urbanized-peasant surzhyk? I think not.

Kyiv Post: Russian can affect Ukrainian, but many people don’t think of Ukrainian affecting Russian. How does that work?

MF:
Well it can, it can.
This is especially true for Russian speakers who are trying to
learn Ukrainian. Sometimes they pick up certain
features they think that are particularly Ukrainian and then overgeneralize
them. In attempting to speak Ukrainian,
they begin to realize that Ukrainian does not reduce
vowels as Russian does, so they correctly
pronounce the letters “o” and “e” with their full value,
whether stressed or not. If
those words are similar to their Russian counterparts, they might occasionally
begin to pronounce them in the Ukrainian way instead of the Russian way when
speaking Russian. Sometimes they over-generalize
Ukrainian morphology and apply it to Russian.

Kyiv Post: In your opinion, how is surzhyk used on the Ukrainian political stage?

MF: Well,
the political and social perception of surzhyk is
very interesting. It can
be associated with the hip-talk of disk-jockeys or criminal speech on the one
hand, and with poor education on the other. Government polling done during the
period of Perestroika ignored it, pretending that it simply didn’t exist. Of
course it does, and it causes great concern to Ukrainian prescriptivists who
see it as an impure form of speech that threatens the integrity of the state
language.

Kyiv Post: Do you find surzhyk as being particularly unique to Ukraine? Or do you find other processes similar?

MF: These
kinds of hybrids are not at all
uncommon. What is unusual is that two genetically related languages
are involved. One thinks of Chinese-English pidgins or
Javanese-Dutch pidgins but not pidgins that result from the
interaction of closely related languages.

Kyiv Post: It seems that more and more people from the Middle East and Africa come to Ukraine for education and job opportunities. Do you think that can have an effect on Ukrainian language in the future?

MF: Well,
one way that language can grow in stature is through extended
use. The more people use Ukrainian in their everyday life, the firmer is the
foundation for the future vitality of the language. In this respect, I think it is
extremely important that
Ukrainian remain THE state language of Ukraine. It should remain the primary language used in
government offices and should receive special support for its use in mass media
and entertainment. Students or immigrants who come to Ukraine for educational
or occupational opportunities should learn to speak proper, grammatical
Ukrainian. If they do, then that
will only strengthen the position of
Ukrainian in Ukraine. Absolutely!

Kyiv Post staff writer Ilya Timtchenko can be reached at [email protected]