Language and Society in Post-Communist Europe. Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995 by J. A. s> Dunn Ronald J. Hill (review)

Abstract

Reviews Dunn, J. A. (ed.). Language andSociety in Post-Communist Europe. Selected Papers from theFifth WorldCongress of Central andEast European Studies,Warsaw, 1995. General editor, Ronald J. Hill. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London and St Martin's Press, New York, I999. xi + I77 pp. Notes. Indexes. ?40?00? THEsix chaptersof thisbook byJ. A. Dunn, LudmilaFerm,V. M. Mokienko, Wolf Moskovich, Boris Norman and Lara Ryazanova-Clarke offer original and telling insights into the changing Russian language. The articles of Alexander Krouglov and Seppo Lallukkarecall that languages other than Russianare involvedin change, while those of Stang&-Zhirovova's (on French loan-words)and Wulfhild Ziel's (on the work of Potebnja),while less central to the topic, are interestingand, in Ziel'scase, erudite. Dunn shows how the Russian language has been transformedin the postSoviet period by the disintegration of the Soviet political language and by Westernization, especially in the fields of economics, politics and social activity. The language has been infiltrated,not only by loans and slang, but by archaisms,wordplay and puns, while the principlesof politicalcorrectness are applied in a limited fashion only, as the language has struggledto borrow or createthe terminologyof a Western-typesociety. Ferm considers the development of political metaphor in the post-Soviet period, distinguishingmetaphorsthat have been used in a political sense only post I985 (especially those involving schvatka'skirmish' and probuksovka 'stalling'), metaphors with new referents, and completely new metaphors, manybasedon thehumanorganismanditsdiseases,and(perhapssymbolizing transitionto a new society)on transport. Mokienko detects a democratic spirit of spontaneity in contemporary Russian, in contrast to Soviet purism. Russian has not been alone in experiencing an influxof Americanisms,in fact the internationalizationof the language has been going on for centuries. Present change involves the resurrectionor re-evaluationof obsolete words and phrases,while neologisms have invadedthemassmedia. Linguisticnormsareimperilled,but 'pessimistic forecasts which place the present-day Russian language "on the brink of disaster"have no linguisticfoundation'(p. 82). Moskovich describes the language of nationalistic groupings in Russia, much of it anti-semitic,with calquing from Nazi German (bezzidizm 'absence of Jews') and some survivals from Soviet propaganda (siono-nacisty 'ZionoNazis '). One device isto useHebrew words,anotherinvolvesword-play,while rusaki,rusiciand nasi'our people' are used as stylistically-loadedvariants to russkie and non-Russians are termed cernye 'blacks', nerus''non-Russians' or zapadency (fromWesternUkraine). Norman'spaper on language games in contemporaryRussiandistinguishes a number of categories:unusualword formations(tennisizacija 'tennisization'), metaphors (jascik'box, TV set'), ellipses, and condensed sentences (vockax i v nedoumenii 'in glasses and in bewilderment'). Language play is portrayed as REVIEWS 309 typical of periods of upheaval, when language can be transformed -even if the world cannot. Ryazanova-Clarke defines a new genre: Western-style persuasive advertising , examining the subtleties of pronominal usage, rhetorical questions, imperatives (more regularly used than in the West: Reguljarno mojtegolovu 'Wash your hair regularly'), ellipses (Komplektes"e$ prakticnee'The set is even more practical'), informal and vernacular forms and aphorisms and repetitions. Ryazanova-Clarke concludes that the genre 'has created a new configuration of semantic resources' (p. I32). Krouglov depicts Soviet Russian as a tool designed to maintain power in the Republics, with linguistic norms imposed by the CPSU. By the I970S to the I98os Ukrainian had degenerated into 'the language of the "lower" strata of the population' (p. 38). Now attempts are being made to return to preSoviet times, and neologisms based on native roots are commoner in Ukrainian than in Russian. Lallukka's analysis of the status of Komi-Permiak epitomizes the fate of minority languages in the FSU, with Komi-Permiak relegated to colloquial registers. By the I980s Komi-Permiak had ceased to be a language of school instruction, and many parents favoured Russian as the language of social advance, while a society for the promotion of Komi-Permiak has been less than well supported in the I99os. Nadia Stang-Zhirovova examines the use of French loan-words in the language of Russian immigrants in Francophone Belgium. Most affected is the spoken language of the educated middle and upper class (Ja zvonila im, no u nichrepondeur automatique [for Russian avtootvetcik] 'I rang them but they have an answerphone'). The collection concludes with Ziel's piece on the fundamental question of the relationship between language...