Pidgin as a Given
The week before last, Kyiv’s Youth Theater was the venue of a rather unusual cultural event called “A Mock Trial of Surzhyk, or a 21st-Century Inquisition.” The organizers, the Ukrayinsky Svitanok Association of Ukrainian Culture, staged a “show trial” of the Russian-Ukrainian pidgin language commonly known as surzhyk, which is spoken, alas, by a considerable number of Ukrainians. Invited to take part in this patriotic action were many scholars, writers, and journalists, including Oleksandr Irvanets, Mykola Kniazhytsky, Svitlana Povaliayeva, Anatoliy Pohribny, Les Poderviansky, Oleksandr Ponomariv, Pavlo Solodko, Les Ulyanenko, and many others.
The “judicial” roles were distributed as follows. Writer Yury Pokalchuk, a well-known champion of an uncorrupted mother tongue, was the prosecution attorney. He announced before the court session, “As the prosecutor, I will be asking for the death sentence or at least life imprisonment for the defendant.” The defense attorney was Bohdan Zholdak, a writer whose characters often speak real-life surzhyk. Some witnesses defended the culprit on the grounds that it is allegedly difficult to distinguish between surzhyk and the rather normal dialect of a certain region in this country. (Experts said unequivocally, “Dialect is one thing, but surzhyk is totally different: it is shameful corruption!” Is this convincing, or what?
Oles Doniy, editor-in-chief of the journal Moloda Ukrayina, whose article “Long Live Surzhyk” in a way provoked this trial, played the role of judge. According to Mr. Doniy, “ surzhyk is in fact a lingua franca spoken by 90-95% of Ukraine’s population. So if we rebel against it, most people will instead opt for Russian, whereas our goal is absolutely different — to see to it that the Russian-speaking populace switches to Ukrainian.” During their testimonies, the witnesses expressed a lot of intelligent ideas and sound proposals — from imposing a complete and immediate ban on surzhyk (which may result in muteness on the part of a considerable proportion of Ukrainians, including top officials) to granting it the status of a second official language.
In general, I think the first attempt of a public debate on one of our most acute problems by means of a mock trial, farcical in form and serious in content, was quite a success. In any case, it easily beat out not only similar attempts on TV, which are characterized by artificiality, fragmentariness, preset scenarios, cutouts, and censorship, but also dreary academic roundtables and conferences. The participants in this extravaganza displayed jovial wittiness, sincere interest, and uninhibited attitudes, as well as forgotten civic courage and frankness in expressing opinions and rating certain politicians and public events. The hall was filled with an attentive, heartily applauding, and laughing audience. Little wonder, after all, because the speakers demonstrated eloquence, as well as erudition and good manners.
But I will take the liberty of casting certain doubts on the latter and ask if good manners can go hand in hand with foul language in public, in the presence of women, without any special provocation — language that forces listeners to cower humbly and instantly transports them to a world of entirely different people, relationships, and circumstances.
Another comment is about the debate itself. There was no debate as such because both the “defense attorney” and the “public prosecutor” belonged to the same camp of practitioners and advocates of the Ukrainian language. The “enemy camp” was not represented at all, although there were Ukrainian Russians present in court. They occasionally shouted protests and remarks nervously from the dark corners of the room, but none of them was invited to come to the microphone on the podium. No swords were crossed despite the announced presence of both haters and practitioners of surzhyk in the “courtroom.”
A few remarks should be made about the way the problem was presented. It is probably no great exaggeration to say that millions of Ukrainians and Russians speak different kinds of surzhyk. Which of these surzhyks was on trial? Society is, of course, mostly worried about surzhyk-speaking Ukrainians (there are far more Ukrainians than Ukrainian-speaking people in this country now), i.e., people who perhaps want very badly to begin speaking a pure and authentic mother tongue. Unfortunately, this cannot happen instantly, in the twinkling of an eye. This is a far more difficult thing to do than renaming a street or tearing down a monument to an erstwhile leader. Language purists should understand that in the long run the much-maligned surzhyk reflects nothing more than the desire of people to speak Ukrainian or at least to put some Ukrainian words that have remained in the remote nooks and corners of their memory since childhood into the language that they speak. This requires time, an all-out joint effort of the state, academic and civic institutions, as well as heavy funding. High-sounding speeches, chest beating, contempt, and mockery won’t help, especially since the ability to learn languages, even one’s native language, is a divine gift, not just a question of desire.
What will a ban on “the corrupt surzhyk” mean? Today, it will mean just one thing: thousands and thousands of Ukrainians will be brought back to the customary language that for some reason is called Russian in Ukraine. In other words, this will slow down the existing, albeit weak, progress of things Ukrainian in our society. This is occurring in a situation when no serious measures are being taken in this country to bring people back to their mother tongue. Meanwhile, such universally known measures were developed long ago and are being applied in the West, among them, scientifically backed levels of knowledge of the official language by people from various walks of life, including civil servants and elected representatives at all rungs of the governmental ladder, and impartial and strict exams for all, without exception, “cogs” in the administrative machine (in other countries, failure to know the official language is classified as professional inefficiency). What is crucially needed is a wide network of free “Ukrainian clubs,” where people of all ages can have access to dictionaries, interesting books, audio- and video-cassettes, consultants, etc., where they can sing Ukrainian songs or perform in some old vaudeville. As always, the only obstacle is that this requires work, not just shouting at a rally.
