Trasianka

Trasianka or trasyanka (Belarusian: трасянка) refers to a mixed form of speech in which Belarusian and Russian elements and structures alternate in rapid succession. There is a similar phenomenon in Ukraine, an Ukrainian–Russian language mixture, called surzhyk.

In Belarusian the word literally means low quality hay, when indigent farmers mix (shake: трасуць, trasuts) fresh grass with the yesteryear's dried hay. The word acquired the second meaning ("language mixture of low quality") relatively recently, in the second half of the 1980s, when a series of publications in the literary newspaper “Litaratura i mastactva” criticized developments in the use of the Belarusian language under Soviet rule.Zianon Pazniak is often said to be the one who has popularized the use of the word for the Belarusian-Russian language mixture (see Pozniak, 1988). For the Belarusian-Russian borderland it has been reported that the phenomenon usually referred to by the term "trasianka" is called "meshanka" instead (this information is based on an interdisciplinary research carried out in the district of Horki and Drybin in 2004).

In the area of present-day Belarus the mixing of speech has a relatively long history. This is because the Belarusian (and, similarly, Ukrainian) territories were for a long time borderlands in which local dialects contacted with closely related socially dominant languages (Polish, Russian). Whether such older forms of mixing Belarusian with Russian should be referred to as “trasianka” is arguable as there was no intergenerational transfer of speech in those times. A literary example for this kind of mixing can be found in the 19th-century play by Wincenty Dunin-Marcinkiewicz The Gentry of Pinsk (see the 1984 edition). Although it is a piece of art and not a record of everyday speech, it can be assumed that it reflects real language use (in certain situations with certain types of people) of that time. A first academic and journalistic debate on Belarusian-Russian mixed speech took place in the 1920s.

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