Defending borders and crossing boundaries: ideologies of polylanguaging in interviews with bilingual Ukrainian youth

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper analyses adolescent Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals’ stances towards polylanguaging as evidenced in their talk about and use of suržyk, a stigmatised polylingual practice that combines features from Ukrainian and Russian. Drawing from group interviews with 39 Ukrainian young people (aged 14–15), it uses Bakhtin’s (The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans). University of Texas Press; 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. and Trans). University of Minnesota Press) concept of voice and Agha’s (Voice, footing, and enregisterment, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 8–59) work on registers as social voices to explore the alignments that these young people take up vis-a-vis the ideologically-mediated voices that suržyk has traditionally indexed. Through a micro-level discourse analysis of both metadiscourses in which ideologies of linguistic boundary maintenance were explicitly articulated and intervieees’ crossing of these boundaries during the interviews, the analysis shows how these young people appropriated, resisted, or creatively exploited prevailing purist ideologies and considers implications for a possible re-evauation of suržyk as a normative practice.