this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Personally, my take is that surzhyk is not a single variety. It's an umbrella term over multiple different varieties, grouped by origin: either Ukrainian with some Russian influence, or the opposite. With surzhyky from different areas being vastly different from each other.
And, if I had to take a guess, most surzhyky (surzhyks? How am I supposed to pluralise this in English?) of the 1930s were Ukrainian with heavy Russian interference, while the ones nowadays are the opposite. Roughly speaking, the "base" language being the one people are shifting from, and the superstrate being the one they're shifting to.
Some might argue those varieties are creoles; I think the label "creole" gets messy when dealing with varieties that have some mutual intelligibility, like Ukrainian and Russian (or Portuguese and Spanish). Because one of the main features of a creole is "gluing" features from both parent languages with local innovations, but they aren't required if there's mutual intelligibility and a lot of the grammar is shared.
I'm not a linguist, but I think surzhyky and portuñol are usually just considered code-mixing or code-switching, for the reasons you listed.
When it comes to portuñol I'm pretty sure the ones I heard in Ciudad del Este (PY) and in Rivera (UY) are two different beasts:
I'm really not sure on surzhyk, though. I wonder if it's a similar situation, some being code-mixing and some being already their own "stable" varieties.
In Uruguay, they have a dialect of Portuguese that is often called portunhol, but is distinct of what most Portuguese and Spanish speakers would call portuñol/portunhol, because it's a stable dialect. And Ciudad del Este might be a similar case.
Ah. It's that dialect I'm talking about. I always heard people referring to it as "portunhol", at most "riverense".
One thing that caught my attention in that variety was people using [ʃ] for a few words both PT and ES would use [s]; for example
Not really. In CdE it's mostly that quick-and-dirty mix while you're buying/selling stuff. The city is a commercial hotspot for Brazilians because it allows you to buy imported stuff without paying import taxes (they're outrageously high in Brazil).
Vice versa actually. In soviet times many Ukrainians had to learn russian, thus it was russian with a mix of Ukrainian.
Modern days it's 2022 urge to drop russian, but people who didn't have much Ukrainian practice still use some russian words. But bad Ukrainian is better than good russian.
Got it. It makes sense.