Про деякі сучасні тенденції у функціонуванні української мови

Анотація

Background. The article proceeds from conception that the official language is one of the main permanent factors ensuring normal existence and functioning of any country. This statement is especially important to Ukrainian taking into account all numerous prosecutions and restrictions that it had to go through during its historical development and a hard current situation in Ukraine.

Purpose. The purpose of paper is a short review of current trends of linguistic situation in Ukraine by means of comparing functions of different linguistic registers of Ukrainian.

Results. The article states that the long (over 350 years) coexistence of Ukrainian and Russian in the same area resulted in appearance of phenomenon of the so called Ukrainian-Russian “surzhyk”. This linguistic register can be interpreted as a kind of popular speech of Ukrainian which appeared as a result of bilingual situation with the domination of Russian. Nowadays the gradual reinforcement of Ukrainian in the status of the official language resulted in appearance of opposite popular speech of Russian – the Russian-Ukrainian surzhyk. The normal functioning of language provides simultaneous coexistence of literary language as well as spoken language and different forms of slang (professional, young peoples’ and so on).

As it is well known, an enormous quantity of English words with new meanings burst into our language because of the total globalization. The great number of these words are the special terms that enlarge the volume of different Ukrainian professional vocabularies. However, there are many cases when speakers prefer to use the anglicized hybrid forms instead their adequate Ukrainian equivalents. The abundance of such cases testifies to an inadequate language persistence of Ukrainians and put obstacles in the normal functioning of their language.

Key words: linguistic competence, interference, Ukrainian-Russian surzhyk, Russian-Ukrainian surzhyk, young peoples’ slang, globalization, language persistence.