The Russian Language ‘On the Brink’

Abstract

The rapid political changes that have taken place in Eastern Europe over the past five years have brought about a sudden disintegration of many well-established social, economic and cultural patterns. This process is clearly visible in the languages of the former ‘socialist camp’. Standard Russian (the Russian literary language) has in the past few years undergone such far-reaching changes that it is already possible to speak of its having acquired a new functional status: by escaping the tight boundaries of a rigorous purism and by a renewal of its lexical and phraseological resources, it has become much more democratic, cosmopolitan and dynamic. Where there was formerly a set of rules drawn up by ‘the guardians of the purity of the Russian language’, who used as their models either the literature of the classics and of the ‘socialist realist’ period or else the cliches of bureaucratic ‘journalese’, a preference is now shown for the language of the ‘de-sovietised’ mass media and for a spontaneous living language (including sub-standard elements and various forms of slang) which is no longer subject to the control of censors or the army of in-house editors. It is significant that under the pressure of the present language situation even those linguists who until recently were not prepared to contemplate any departure from the strict principles of ‘language purity’ or ‘language culture’ (культура речи) are now forced either to rely on the fluid and in many respects subjective criterion of ‘language taste’ (языковой вкус) or else to recognise the existence of a ‘vulgarisation of the present-day literary norm’ (вульгаризация современной литературной нормы).1