Trasianka
Categories: Belarusian language | Russian language | Mixed languages | Pidgins and creoles
Trasianka or trasyanka (be: трасянка) is a Belarusian–Russian patois or a kind of interlanguage (from the linguistic point of view). It is often labeled "pidgin" or even "creole", which is not correct by any widespread definition of pidgin or creole. That is probably due to the fact that the words "pidgin" and "creole" have pejorative, derogatory connotations among non-experts in Belarus as well as the word "trasianka" itself. 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") relatively recently (probably around the time of the collapse of the USSR), although it had been known as a phenomenon. In the Belarusian-Russian borderland (at least), even today (in 2004) the Belarusian-Russian language mixture is not called "trasianka". The word used there is most often "meshanka", with similar meaning as "trasianka".
Trasianka is the kind of language typically spoken by villagers in Belarus whose mother tongue is Belarusian but who abandoned the language in favor of Russian, seeing Russian as more "urban," "fashionable," or "civilized." Thus they ended up speaking this "mixture" (interlanguage). Trasianka may be heard also in the cities of Belarus, where it is spoken by older and some middle-aged people, usually former migrants from villages to cities. It is also spoken by some educated (older or middle-aged) people, for example, by the Belarusian president (in the half of the 1990s) or the minister of agriculture (in 2005) and others. It seems that it is an unstable language, the use of which might reduce in the future, as younger generations do not speak it.
There are certain social problems with speaking in trasianka, especially the issue of generation gap that trasianka and literary Belarusian create between parents and children, and the rejection and alienation that has been experienced by some nationalistic activists who insist on using correct literary Belarusian. However, for other intellectuals whose education is connected to national culture (these are among philologists, linguists, historians, culturologists, ethnologists etc.), trasianka is not acceptable in formal communication either. Also in general it is valued low as a "spoiled", "corrupted" Belarusian or Russian. There are several comedians in Belarus (for example Sasha and Sirozha) who use trasianka in their comic skits. The case is that in the past Russian was the only language considered "civilised", which made Belarusians willing to speak it. If they could not totally abandon their mother tongue, a kind of Russian heavily influenced by Belarusian was already considered much "better" than Belarusian. With the ascent of Belarusian as a literary language and the subsequent change in attitude towards it, Trasianks must have fallen into disgrace.
Trasianka speakers use mostly Russian vocabulary, but preserve the phonetical features of Belarusian. Grammar seems to be combined, Belarusian-Russian. Although it does have its structural regulatities, trasianka is relatively variable and presents rather a linguistic continnuum between Belarusian and Russian than a discrete linguistic system.
There is a similar sociolinguistic phenomenon in Ukraine, an Ukrainian–Russian language mixture that is called surzhyk. Overall, trasianka was ignored by the mainstream linguists and sociologists in Belarus and abroad until the 1990s when the first articles which explicitly deal with trasianka started to appear (cf. the references below). In older linguistic literature, the phenomenon is dealt with under the heading "language cultivation" ("kul'tura movy"), "linguistic interference" etc.
A much older but quite simalar blend, in this case of Dutch and Frisian, is Stadsfries, traditionally spoken in the towns of the Dutch province of Friesland. As with Trasianka and Russian and Belarusian, it is gradually being dropped in favour of Dutch and Frisian and often thought of as mere corrupted Ducth, even by its speakers.
References
- CYCHUN, Hienadz A. (2000): Krealizavany pradukt (trasianka jak ab'jekt linhvistycznaha dasledavannia). Arche - Paczatak, 6.
- LISKOVEC, Irina V. (2002): Trasyanka: proiskhozhdeniye, sushchnost', funkcionirovaniye. In Antropologiya, folkloristika, lingvistika, vyp. 2. Sankt-Peterburg: Evropeyskiy universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, pp. 329-343.
- LISKOVEC, Irina V. (2003): Project Novyye yazyki novykh gosudarstv: yavleniya na styke blizkorodstvennykh yazykov na postsovetskom prostranstve. (The part on Belarus.) European University in Sankt-Peterburg.
- MECHKOVSKAYA, Nina B. (1994): Yazykovaya situaciya v Belarusi: Eticheskiye kolliziyi dvuyazychiya. Russian Linguistics, 18, pp. 299-322.
- MECHKOVSKAYA, Nina B. (2002): Yazyk v roli ideologiyi: nacional'no-simvolicheskiye funkciyi yazyka v belorusskoy yazykovoy situaciyi. In: Gutschmidt, K., et al. (eds.): Moeglichkeiten und Grenzen der Standardizierung slavischer Schriftsprachen in der Gegenwart. Dresden: Thelem, pp. 123-141.be:Трасянка