TOPICAL TRENDS OF FEMININE LEXICS’ FUNCTIONING IN UKRAINIAN OFFICIALESE (THE 20S OF XXI CENTURY)

Abstract

The article is focused on the current functional trends of feminine vocabulary in the Ukrainian officialese. The Ukrainianofficialese is one of the language functional styles where femininities are almost not represented. However, in the last fewyears (especially after the approval of the new version of the Ukrainian Orthography in 2019) there has been a gradualincrease in the use of femininities in legal texts, names of professions, official documents and the language of Ukrainiangovernment agencies, international organizations, NGOs and volunteering. The problematics of this article is a continuationof a series of studies on a topical theme, insufficiently represented among the works of Ukrainian linguogenderologists. Thematerial of the research were female names of professions, as well as names of women used in the texts of the Ukrainianofficialese. It is obvious that most of the current cases of the use of feminine agentives do not correspond to the propervocabulary norms, and they also have peculiar features, such as: a majority of language borrowings, the use of parallel feminine and masculine nouns, complex words, and so on. Among the researched lexical units (32 units) it is possibleto single out 4 lexical and semantic groups: feninatives-names of positions entered in SCPU (7 units), femininates ondesignation of names of professions with foreign language origin (3 units), officialese names of women, expressed withcomplex words (6 units), feminine surzhikisms to indicate the names of vacancies (4 units). The conservatism of the Ukrianianofficialese and the confusion caused by the widespread functioning of parallel forms of femininities, which arises due tothe mismatch of vocabulary and usage, leads to unjustified use of borrowings, appearance of surzhik elements, which isunacceptable for this style of language. The current dynamics of the use of feminine vocabulary in the Ukrainian officialeseand the introduction of gender-sensitive language standards indicate that this trend will continue in the coming years,and the field for the study of feminine vocabulary in the official business style of the Ukrainian language will increase.