City of Burlington, Estados Unidos
This article describes and analyzes examples of social media posts and comments in which Ukrainian Cyrillic is used to represent Russian speech, a phenomenon that Androutsopoulos (2015) has termed trans-scripting. Using a theoretical framework emerging from work on the sociolinguistics of stance and negotiation of group identity through social media interactions, the author argues that this orthographic device functions pragmatically as a powerful stance marker. Examples drawn from a corpus of Facebook posts from the 2014–2024 period demonstrate the use of trans-scripted Russian in stance shifting and the use of metastances and enregistered texts to express and invite reader alignment with shared political and linguistic ideologies. In the context of Russia's war in Ukraine, the use of trans-scripted Russian also represents an inversion of historical trends in which Ukrainian, both written and spoken, was often constrained and dominated by Russian. Through an analysis of examples, the author demonstrates how trans-scripted texts link language use and ideological positions in complex ways