One young Russian woman sends an SMS to another’s cellphone in central Moscow: ”Hi, Katya. Ne poiti li nam drink coffee? Call asap! Cheers, Masha.”
The uninitiated might take this for some technical garble, but when 24-year-old student Masha Kuznetsova recently invited her journalist friend Katya out for a coffee, she was using the latest argot of the new Russia.
Russish, Englishian — whatever you call it, the language of Shakespeare is invading the land of Pushkin. Hip youngsters love the succinctness of English, especially when trying to keep a cellphone SMS brief.
But the popularity of Anglicisms is spreading far further.
”All social groups, from the police to immigrant Tajik workers, are using Anglicisms,” a blogger commented during an online debate about the use of slang by young Russian internet users.
Politicians hire ”imeedzh-makers” (image consultants). Doctors describe a shaky diagnosis as ”feefty-feefty” (50:50). The young rush for their ”drrink”. If you’re not invited, perhaps you’re a ”loozer”.
Difficult tongue
Russian is a notoriously difficult language for outsiders, so a liberal sprinkling of English words might seem to help open the country to foreign visitors. But don’t count on it.
Russians increasingly do more than borrow English words. They bend them to their own grammar, combine them with native words, and generally twist them beyond recognition.
For example, an exciting football match could be described as ”drivovy”. The word stems from the English word ”drive”, but has been turned into an adjective. Add to that a strong Russian accent and your average native English speaker would probably not guess that his language was being used at all.
Another example: author Sergei Minayev titled his 2007 novel Dukhless, a match of the Russian word ”dukh” or ”spirit”, and the English suffix ”-less”.
Despite the image common in the West of a closed, sometimes hostile country, Russia was famous in the 18th and 19th centuries for throwing open its linguistic and cultural doors to Europe.
Russian is in fact part of the Indo-European linguistic family, while the exotic-looking alphabet was essentially borrowed from the Greeks.
In the early 18th century, German was all the rage among the elite. Catherine the Great, the most famous empress in Russian history, was herself Prussian-born and German-speaking.
The 19th century may have been the golden age of Russian literary lions such as poet Alexander Pushkin, but this was also a period when the entire ruling class adopted French for day-to-day communication.
Many aristocrats spoke Russian less well than the impoverished masses of serfs. Even now, standard Russian is littered with words rooted in French, such as ”trotuar”, which is ”troittoir” in French.
The history of openness ended with the communist takeover in 1917 and a clampdown on any sign of foreign influence, but was renewed when Mikhail Gorbachev launched his ”glasnost” reforms in the 1980s and opened up the Soviet Union’s borders.
Fury
Today not everyone in President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly nationalist Russia is happy with the English invasion.
Nationalist groups mushrooming across Russia are furious about what they see as contamination of ”pure” Russian culture, just as they often violently oppose the presence of non-white immigrants and ethnic minorities.
”In all great wars waged against Russia, the Russians began with a deep retreat,” reads an angry commentary on the website of the ultra-nationalist Russkaya Ideya (Russian Idea) group. ”So it is today in the so-called information war that our mentality, our great, capable, truthful and free language is to a large extent prisoner of Western ways of thought, Anglicisms, prison jargon and slang.”
However, the latest wave is unstoppable, experts say, since Russia was unprepared, linguistically speaking, for such rapid exposure to technical and economic advances after the Soviet collapse.
The financial sector buzzes with talk of IPOs and derivatives. The film industry cannot avoid talking of 3D images, marketing and promotions — albeit with a Russian accent — since such things did not even exist in the Soviet cinema world.
”After opening up to the West, Russia is assimilating economic, commercial, political and cultural innovations, and along with that comes the terminology, most often of all in English,” said Leonid Krysin, deputy director of the Russian Language Institute in Moscow. — AFP
