Evaluation and use of syntactic level contact structures in the speech of urban Mari speakers The paper focuses on certain syntactic structures which have emerged under the influence of Mari-Russian bilingualism and occur widely in spontaneous Mari speech. In order to find out whether they can already be considered a part of the implicit norms of colloqui al Mari, 1 interviewed 48 Mari speakers from Joshkar-Ola about the acceptability oftwo sets of compound sentences, one of which uses native Mari structures and the other structures typical of Russian. 1 also analysed about 6 hours of spontaneous spe ech recorded from 8 infonnants. The results suggest that the implicit norms are in flux: 31-43% of the tested contact structures were deemed correct by the inform an ts, and such structures occurred spontaneously in their speech in 35-80% of the cases.