Аспекты вариативности русского языка в Украине

Scholars’ attention has recently concentrated on the sociolinguistic situation of the former Soviet States, and Ukraine in particular. Here, besides the national language(s), Russian still covers some of its former domains. Nevertheless, the kind of Russian spoken in Ukraine often presents specific language features that may induce the sociolinguist to speak of a Ukrainian variety of Russian. This article aims both at highlighting some socio-cultural aspects that contributed to the shaping of the contemporary language situation and analyzing typical (recurrent) language features distinguishing the Russian spoken by the majority of Ukrainians from the standard Russian.