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‘We Speak an Orphan Tongue’: Trasianka, Named Languages and Code-switching
I can't finish thi-
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.
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, 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.
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.
The situation of diglossia mentioned above involves trasianka and Russian but not trasianka and Belarusian. Why is that? The answer can be multi-layered, especially when focusing on different time periods in Belarusian history. In general terms, however, Belarusian hasn’t succeeded in becoming the high variety, and for some part due to tragic reasons. The policy of Belarusization in the 1920s was designed to reverse the effects of Russification and was producing real results in promoting and advancing the Belarusian language. By the end of the 1920s, 80% of civil servants spoke fluent Belarusian and 80% of schools used Belarusian as the language of instruction. However, in the 1930s, Stalinism and its brutal repression of the national elites put an end to Belarusization and other similar national programs across the Soviet Union.
As for the present moment, things have not become easier. Belarusian is still not the high variety but it is not the low variety either. With Belarus gaining independence in 1991, it is no longer the case of the colonizer framing the language of the colonized as inferior. The status of the Belarusian language nowadays is somewhat mysterious. It is one of the official languages, one of the languages taught in every school, and yet with each passing year it feels like it is slipping through the fingers of Belarusian people. It is not an endangered language per se but it is the language that is attempted to be erased, one small policy at a time. As a pushback against this, the Belarusian language has at the same time become a product of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, so its use in the public sphere can be considered a political statement and is usually seen as such, even by cashiers in grocery stores. Meanwhile, Russian seems neutral, almost apolitical. There exists a universe where nowadays Belarusians switch between Belarusian and trasianka instead, but unfortunately, a lot of history would have to be changed for it to be the case.
Trasianka has been viewed as an unwanted form of language, a sign of bad taste, and a source of mockery. Is it a variety of the language of and for uneducated people? Trasianka is used by people of different levels of education, and in reality, the question boils down to something else. It is an index of its rural origin, and some will take a classist stance irrespective of factual data. It has also been said that if you speak trasianka, then you can’t speak ‘pure’ Russian or Belarusian. Funnily enough, quite often it wouldn’t be accurate as well. For many, trasianka remains the language spoken at home and one that is acquired by children first. But once they go to school, they learn Russian and/or Belarusian and then they can switch between the two depending on the interlocutor and context. So trasianka can’t be seen as just an understudied variant of Russian because children become fluent in Russian in addition to trasianka. And it is often done simultaneously and not as a result of ‘evolving’ trasianka to ‘proper’ Russian.
Is a linguistic phenomenon like trasianka unique? Not at all. New language varieties emerge due to extensive language contact all around the world. At the same time, it is important not to equate them due to the different and nuanced sociohistorical and linguistic factors in each case. Consider Silesian and the influence of German, for example. Nowadays there are music groups, TV and radio stations in Silesian. Or the derogatorily named Spanglish, which describes any language variety that mixes American English and Spanishes, which may include, for example, Mexican or Puerto Rican varieties.
To give a quick example, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, the author of the titular quote, explores the Chicano experience through the lens of colonialism, race, and gender in her semi-autobiographical work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. She uses code-switching, that is, using both Chicano Spanish and English, to challenge conventional Western writing as well as the invisible ‘borders’ of clashing identities. She writes, ‘[w]e are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje.’ Indeed, border identities or mixed speech may be the nightmare of the homogenous, or homogeneity-striving, elites and the dominating high-variety languages.
At the same time, however, different types of code-switching can be an integral aspect of defining and honoring one’s complex identity. Chicano English, Silesian, trasianka, or any mixed language variety is not just about what you are, and especially, not what you are said to be by others. It is also about what you were, what you could have been, and what or who was/is around you. In certain cases, code-switching can also be a powerful tool of resistance and preserving or ‘proving’ your identity. This defiance can be against the broadly understood dominating powers and be public, or it can take a deeply personal, introspective nature. An example of the latter is some fiction and poetry written by Belarusians. Such texts feature codeswitching, which can feel empowering by evoking the common ground, the shared past, present, and hopefully future. Or it might feel melancholic, desperate, or even grieving because they are still overpowered by ‘the oppressor’s language.’
Finally, to put some of the things discussed into perspective, I have used ‘language’ and ‘language variety’ at least twenty times in this text. After doing so, even to me, it starts to sound as if a specific language was a natural object. But it is not. Just like an hour is not just a naturally occurring ‘thing’, but a concept of time turned into an object with more or less defined boundaries. Surely, we need these ‘boxes’ to be able to measure or talk about them. And yet, why don’t we take a moment and entertain the idea that language is not just a ‘thing’ a person has or speaks but something a person does. Which is why many linguists and activists use the term languaging instead of (or along with) a language, highlighting the process and not the object.
I am mentioning this to bring us back to the idea of code-switching and distinguish it from translanguaging. The latter often refers to situations when a multilingual person’s full linguistic repertoire is used and honored. Code-switching, conversely, is a very commonly used term to describe a general phenomenon of alternating between languages or language varieties. I have used it myself in this text because it is a useful analytical tool fit for many purposes. And yet, after foregrounding languaging as an activity and not language as an intrinsic ‘thing’, it is worth noting that the concept of code-switching implies the existence of two codes, languages as discrete objects. It implies that our brain ‘naturally’ sorts out everything into separate linguistic systems. But as I’ve mentioned before, they are not really inherently ‘natural.’ Let’s think of a young bilingual child who doesn’t know they are code-switching after picking up some trasianka from their parents and some Russian from the cartoons on TV. The two languages of a bilingual child exist only in the outsider’s view.
Thus, we can say that code-switching interprets language use from the perspective of an observer. From their insider’s perspective, however, there is only their idiolect, their unique linguistic repertoire, which belongs to them and not to any named language.
Translanguaging, on the other hand, privileges the speaker and urges to move from a language as a boxed entity to languaging – the practice of using language realized from one moment to another. Translanguaging pedagogies often emphasize how ideas of discrete bounded languages are ideological constructs that may limit language practice and learning. What if we spoke languages without the rigorous enforcement of named languages, without suppressing the wrong linguistic features or the ‘wrong’ named languages?
In conclusion, since it is necessary to put concepts and experiences into ‘boxes’ for us to be able to talk about them, for the first – and larger – part of the text I have ‘boxed’ trasianka. I have talked about codeswitching, which also means that I did so from an outsider’s perspective. But I wish to finish by lingering on (trans)languaging because then the debate over whether to use the term ‘BRMS’ or ‘trasianka’ may actually make you reflect on whether we assess the language from the outside or consider the experience of a speaker.
This text was brought to you in the named language English, while I took breaks talking with my mom in Russian and reading poems grieving the Belarusian language ‘the one that got away.’ But these named languages are not objects, I shouldn’t care too much if I ‘have’ them. If I focus on languaging, I can focus on my own complex sense of identity and feel the freedom of languaging.
