Abstrakt
In modern Ukrainian, the word surzhyk means 'a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian language eluding grammatical rules'. This kind of sociolect has been used in some Ukrainian literary fiction since the beginning of contemporary Ukrainian literature until the present.
This report tries to define surzhyk as a socio-linguistic phenomenon which was formed in the context of Russian-Ukrainian diglossia. This phenomenon could also be noticed in some classic texts of Ukrainian authors (Skovoroda, Kotljarevskyj, Kvitka-Osnovjanenko).