Метамовні рефлексії і дискурсивні практики мешканців Центральної України

The article dwells upon the metalinguistic reflections of the inhabitants of Central Ukraine, who use in their everyday communication Ukrainian and Russian languages, as well as Ukrainian-Russian mixed speech (URMS). Based on a closed-ended questionnaire, as well as open-ended semi-structured interviews (a research project of the University of Oldenburg in 2014), I studied both implicit (self-translations) and explicit (characteristics in the categories of ‟own / foreign”, reflections on language codes) metalinguistic reflections. The speakers self-translate into Ukrainian and Russian almost equally (though with some predominance in favour of Russian). There is a statistically significant correlation between the direction of self-translations and some socio-demographic parameters of the respondents, namely: region, first language, age group, type of settlement where the respondents live, education level. The gender of the respondents, the subcorpus (semiformal interviews or informal family conversations), as well as the type of the settlement where the respondents have grown up, do not show a statistically significant correlation with the direction of self-translations. The respondents mostly refer to the URMS as ‟their” language code (‟po-našomu”), contrasting it with other regional substandards or dialects, or even standard languages – Ukrainian and Russian (‟po-jixn'omu”), rarely – structurally more distant foreign languages (‟ne po-našomu”). The statements about the URMS are dominated by a positive attitude to the mixed variety, which is explained by its convenience, familiarity, and ease of use. The analysis of both the closed-ended survey and the open-ended interviews demonstrated that the respondents mostly consider the URMS as a variant of the Ukrainian language, focusing on its vocabulary, less often on its morphological or phonetic features.