Towards an Automatic Recognition of Mixed Languages: The Case of Ukrainian-Russian Hybrid Language Surzhyk

Abstract

Language interference is common in today’s multilingual societies where more languages are in contact, and as a global result leads to the creation of hybrid languages. These, together with doubts on their right to be officially recognised, emerged the problem of their automatic identification and further elaboration in the area of computational linguistics. In this paper, we propose a first attempt to identify the elements of a Ukrainian-Russian hybrid language, Surzhyk, through the adoption of the example-based rules created with the instruments of programming language R. Our example-based study consists of: 1) analysis of spoken samples of Surzhyk registered by Del Gaudio (2010) in Kyiv area and creation of the written corpus; 2) production of specific rules on the identification of Surzhyk patterns and their implementation; 3) testing the code and analysing the effectiveness of the hybrid language classifier.