Does One in Ten Speak Surzhyk, or One in Five? A Mixed Speech That Changes with How You Count

In Ukraine there is a form of speech called “surzhyk” (суржик), in which elements of Ukrainian and Russian mix without following the rules of either standard written language. So how many people speak it? Look into it, and you find a figure close to one in ten, and also one close to one in five. Neither is wrong. The number changes depending on what is asked, and who is judging.

Below, we lay out, with sources attributed, how dictionaries and encyclopedias have described this word, why survey figures diverge, and how it appears in literature and on stage. How Ukrainian and Russian differ as languages is covered in the article on the differences between Ukrainian and Russian.

The Name of a Flour Became the Name of a Speech

The 11-volume Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (СУМ, published by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 1970–1980) gives суржик two meanings. The first: “a mixture of grains — wheat and rye, rye and barley, barley and oats, and so on — or flour made from that mixture.” The second, figurative meaning, as a usage for speech: “elements of two or more languages combined artificially without observing the norms of the literary language. Impure speech.”

The entry “Surzhyk” (written by M.V. Strikha, March 2025) in the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine (ЕСУ), compiled by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Shevchenko Scientific Society, likewise traces the word’s origin to “bread or flour from mixed grain,” and defines it as “elements of several languages (most often Ukrainian and Russian) combined without observing the norms of the literary language.” The same entry notes that a similar phenomenon exists in Belarus, called “trasianka” (трасянка).

The Old Meaning and the Current Meaning

	Original meaning	Meaning about speech
What it refers to	A mixture of different kinds of grain, or the flour made from it	Speech in which Ukrainian, Russian, and other elements mix without following the rules of the written language
СУМ-11’s account	First meaning	Second meaning (figurative, for speech). “Impure speech”
ЕСУ’s account (2025)	Cited as the etymology	Given as the definition. Also touches on combinations other than Ukrainian and Russian

The ЕСУ entry gives examples such as “нада” in place of “треба” (need to), “січас” in place of “зараз” (now), and “скоко времʼя” in place of “котра година” (what time). The explanation is that while everyday words shift from Russian, Ukrainian features partly remain in sentence structure and pronunciation.

Listening for Where the Mixing Happens

The entry “Russian language in Ukraine” (written by Oleksa Horbach; first published in the 1993 volume 4 of the print encyclopedia) in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU, published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta) calls surzhyk a “mixed Russian-Ukrainian patois” and lists the following features.

• Ukrainian-style pronunciation of the h sound, and of the vowels o, e, and y
• Hardening of word-final r and labial consonants
• Ukrainian-style linking of words in phrases, stress placement, and the case governed by certain verbs and prepositions (for example, po domax “in the homes” in place of the Russian po domam)
• Ukrainian vocabulary from everyday life

The same entry states that the surzhyk of Kharkiv was studied by Borys Larin, that of the Donbas by Kostiantyn Nimchynov, and that of Dnipropetrovsk oblast by V. Shadura. That Ukrainian features remain in pronunciation and sentence structure while Russian enters the vocabulary overlaps with the ЕСУ examples above. This IEU account dates to its 1993 original publication and does not reflect subsequent change.

Where Did It Come From?

The ЕСУ entry traces surzhyk’s origins to the linguistic divisions of a time when Ukrainians had no state of their own. The upper classes spoke mostly Russian (Polish, in Halychyna), Ukrainian was confined to peasant life, and the vocabulary of church, law, medicine, and factories existed only in an outside language. As a result, Ukrainians who stepped outside the home had little choice but to use borrowed expressions, the entry explains. It also states that from the late 19th century, railways, sugar factories, and military service brought peasants into everyday contact with Russian-speaking officials and factory owners.

According to the same entry, by the late 1950s a great movement from the countryside to the cities meant most Ukrainians came to live in urban areas. Figures the entry cites for 1926 give the share of Ukrainians in the urban population as 42.1% in Kyiv, 38.3% in Kharkiv, 17.4% in Odesa, and 16.2% in Lviv. People who moved to the towns tried to shift to Russian and “in practice shifted to surzhyk,” the entry states. Language-policy figures of the Soviet period are covered in the article on half a century of postwar Ukraine, and the 1920s “Ukrainization” in the article on the “Ukrainization” that began in 1923.

The US anthropologist Laada Bilaniuk, in a lecture given at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute on March 11, 2002, divided what is called surzhyk into five types. According to the summary of the lecture (the Kennan Institute’s public record), these are: (1) surzhyk of people who moved from the countryside to the city, (2) surzhyk fixed as a village dialect, (3) a “Sovietized Ukrainian” brought closer to Russian from the 1930s onward, (4) the habitual mixing of bilingual speakers, and (5) surzhyk arising after independence as Russian speakers try to speak Ukrainian. Only the last type runs in the opposite direction from the others, arising midway in a shift from Russian to Ukrainian, Bilaniuk explains.

How Many People Speak It: Laying Out the Numbers

The share of people who speak surzhyk varies greatly depending on how it is measured. The table below lists, in chronological order, figures whose source and method are known.

Survey year	Source	What was measured	Figure for “mixed speech”
1995	Nationwide survey introduced by Bilaniuk in her lecture	Open-ended written answer for native language	Under 1% wrote “surzhyk”
1995	Same as above	Answer chosen from options for the language spoken at home	10% chose “mixed language (surzhyk)”; 2% chose both Ukrainian and Russian; 16% chose “sometimes Ukrainian, sometimes Russian”
1996–1999	Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS)	Bilingual interviewers judged the language actually spoken after the interview	18.2%
2000–2003	Same as above	Same as above	14.7% (11.9% for 2003 alone)
September 2014	KIIS (commissioned by Volodymyr Kulyk)	Interviewers recorded the language actually spoken during the interview	11%
December 2022	Same as above	Same as above	13% (22% in the east and south)
December 2022	Same as above	Self-reported language spoken with family	19% said “both about equally” (no “surzhyk” option was offered)
June 2024	Razumkov Centre	Self-reported language spoken at home	18% said “Ukrainian and Russian in almost equal measure” (no “surzhyk” option)
February–March 2025	KIIS	Self-reported language usually spoken at home	19% said “Ukrainian and Russian in equal measure” (no “surzhyk” option)

“Both” and “Mixed Speech” Are Not the Same

The table’s figures diverge for at least three reasons.

The first is who judges. Since 1996, KIIS has had bilingual interviewers record, after each interview, whether the respondent’s speech fell into “Ukrainian,” “Russian,” or “a mixture of both” (Khmelko’s paper) — a judgment by the listener, not a self-report. The 2025 questions from the Razumkov Centre and KIIS, on the other hand, are self-reported, offering no “surzhyk” option, only “about equally both.” This option cannot distinguish people who switch between two languages depending on the situation from people who mix them within a single sentence.

The second is reluctance to admit it. Bilaniuk, in her lecture, said that surzhyk figures are hard to capture because some people are unwilling to admit speaking a stigmatized form of speech. That the 1995 survey found under 1% when native language was written freely, but 10% when it was offered as an option, is presented as evidence of this.

The third is the scope of the sample. Surveys since 2022 do not include territory occupied by Russia. The ЕСУ entry, after citing the Razumkov Centre’s 2024 figure, adds that this change is also explained by “Kyiv’s loss of control over the southern and eastern regions that were traditionally more Russian-speaking.”

Regional Differences: Five Regions in 2003

Khmelko’s paper shows, by region, the share of people whose speech interviewers judged to be “mixed” in the 2003 KIIS survey.

Region (paper’s grouping)	Oblasts included	Mixed speech
West	Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Zakarpattia, Chernivtsi	2.5%
West-Central	Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Kirovohrad, Cherkasy, Kyiv oblast and the city of Kyiv	14.6%
East-Central	Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Sumy, Chernihiv	21.7%
South	Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Autonomous Republic of Crimea	12.4%
East	Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk	9.6%

The East-Central figure is nearly nine times the West’s. Meanwhile, in the more Russian-speaking east and south, the share of mixed speech comes out lower than in the East-Central region. The same paper states that in 2003, mixed speech was recorded for 13.8% (±0.8) of those who identified their ethnicity as Ukrainian, and about 5% of those who identified as Russian.

Dirty Speech, or Simply Another Form of Speech?

How surzhyk is evaluated varies greatly by source. Below, the main positions are presented alongside who wrote them.

“Засмічене”: A Dictionary That Treats It as Something to Correct

The entry “Surzhyk” (written by K.V. Lenets) in the 2000 Ukrainian Language: An Encyclopedia (Українська мова. Енциклопедія) describes surzhyk mainly as “a colloquial form of Ukrainian засмічене (littered) with unnecessarily borrowed Russian elements,” and as “impoverished speech that has lost its national character, beauty, and expressiveness.” Citing examples such as самольот (airplane), січас (now), and строїти (to build), it calls “the fight against surzhyk one of the main tasks in raising the culture of the Ukrainian language.” The СУМ definition, “impure speech,” points in the same direction.

Research That Questions the View of Language Itself

In her lecture, Bilaniuk argued that what gets called surzhyk is determined not only by the objective features of speech, but by a way of thinking that values linguistic “purity.” The stronger the demand for purity, the more mixing is stigmatized and the more broadly the label “surzhyk” is applied, in her view. She also stated that whether a bilingual person’s way of mixing gets called surzhyk depends on how that person is regarded, and on whether they are thought capable of speaking “pure” Ukrainian.

An Encyclopedia That Sees It as a Stage of Transition

The 2025 ЕСУ entry states that surzhyk was long “a stage in the shift from Ukrainian to Russian,” and that since independence it has gradually also become “a stage in the shift back to Ukrainian for people who had spoken Russian.” It continues that after the state-language laws of 2014 and 2019 and the full-scale invasion of 2022, many people began shifting to Ukrainian without passing through this stage. The content and stages of the state-language law are explained in the article on Ukraine’s state-language law.

The same entry quotes the following observation by the linguist Yurii Shevelov.

In the bilingual metropolis, the Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia likes to use Russian words as an emotionally charged colloquialism — the opposite phenomenon from the peasant’s surzhyk. There, Russian words are used to raise the register; here, to lower it.

Yurii Shevelov, quoted in ЕСУ, “Суржик” (М.В. Стріха, 2025). Translated by the outlet.

What language someone speaks cannot be used to infer their views or political stance. The ЕСУ entry itself notes that in the 1990s, the political views of people who spoke surzhyk ranged “from those who strongly wished for the Soviet Union’s revival to those who strongly supported independence.”

Surzhyk in Literature and on Stage

Surzhyk has also appeared in written works. The IEU entry states that Volodymyr Vynnychenko used it to depict imperial Russian soldiers, Mykhailo Starytsky to depict townspeople, and Oleksandr Korniichuk to depict Soviet police officers.

The ЕСУ entry gives further examples. Ivan Kotliarevsky had a character in his play Natalka Poltavka say of a play by the Russian playwright Aleksandr Shakhovskoy that “a Russian wrote in our language, and badly mangled it.” In the Soviet era, surzhyk mainly found a home in comedy, with examples cited including the works of Ostap Vyshnia and the exchanges of the comedy duo “Tarapunka and Shtepsel.” Another work by Kotliarevsky is covered in the article on Eneida.

The same entry states that surzhyk was used in the lyrics of bands such as “Braty Hadiukiny” at the first “Chervona Ruta” music festival in 1989. In 1997, the actor Andrii Danylko created the surzhyk-speaking stage character “Verka Serduchka.” The writer Bohdan Zholdak published short stories written in surzhyk, and Mykhailo Brynykh published, in 2013–2014, a collection of essays on world and Ukrainian literature written in surzhyk. The entry goes on to state that there is no prospect of a distinct literature written in surzhyk emerging.