I Can’t Finish Thi-
‘We Speak an Orphan Tongue’: Trasianka, Named Languages and Code-Switching Natallia Valadzko Upon arriving in Belarus, one might come across a certain linguistic phenomenon and immediately be perplexed by it. To a Russian speaker outside Belarus, it might sound like ‘a weird kind of Russian.’ Another person who is aware of the country’s bilingualism might take it a step further and assume it to be Belarusian. And yet, neither would be entirely accurate. Belarusians know it as trasianka, literally ‘low-quality mixed grains.’ It is a linguistic variety in Belarus that resulted from a longlasting and intensive Belarusian-Russian language contact. Being relatively stable and conventionalized, trasianka is still practiced by a large part of the country’s population. It is obvious from the name that it is perceived as substandard and inadequate, which is why scholars prefer the term BelarusianRussian-Mixed-Speech (BRMS) in their publications. But in this text, I’ll stick to trasianka because I want to focus on and challenge its derogatory status, on the one hand; on the other hand, this abbreviation reminds me of all the confusingly similar four-letter abbreviations in the past and present Belarus.
into towns, where Russian was maintaining its dominant position. The latter secured its overpowering influence owing to a long history of Russification, first by the Russian Empire and then by the Soviet Union. The dominance of the Russian language persisted as ethnic Russians from other parts of the Soviet Union were moving to Soviet Belarus after the war and assuming leadership positions in the Communist Party or state-owned enterprises. People who recently have arrived in towns and cities struggled with linguistic accommodation. As a result, trasianka emerged, which later saw its intergenerational transfer as the residents’ children were growing up speaking the Belarusian-Russian mix. Is trasianka a ‘dialect’ of Belarusian or Russian? Linguists’ opinions vary. Some scholars claim that BRMS (to use their own term) is a variety of Belarusian; others suggest that it might develop into a regionalect of Russian. However, when it comes to the views of laypeople, out of ~1200 Belarusian small-town dwellers, only 20% consider trasianka to be a variety of Russian, 40% see it as a variety of Belarusian, and the remaining 40% believe that it is ‘something in the middle,’ a mix of the two.
For a long time, Belarusian territories have been borderlands, where local dialects came into contact with more socially dominant languages, like Polish or Russian. So the mixing of languages isn’t anything recent. However, what is now recognized as trasianka has to do with the changes in Soviet Belarus after World War II. Due to postwar industrialization there was a substantial labor migration from rural areas to towns. The number of urban dwellers increased from 21% in the 1950s up to 66% in the 1990s. What happened was that villagers were bringing Belarusian, especially dialectal varieties,
The linguistic landscape in Belarus is sometimes described as diglossia, i.e. the context in which the bilingual community switches between two languages depending on the purpose. The high variety is used in formal settings and schools, while the low variety is spoken in informal spaces with family and friends. Trasianka, being the low variety, has been stigmatized in favor of the official and ‘neutral’ high variety of Russian.
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