The Russian Language Today (review)

This is the first comprehensive account of Russian language evolution devoted to the last fifteen years of the twentieth century. Although most recent changes involve vocabulary, some grammatical patterns have also entered a period of flux so that the momentous events attendant on the collapse of communism in Russia seem to have affected all layers of the language. One of the book’s strong points is its use of copious examples from contemporary literature and media sources to illustrate all of the changes it describes. The book also includes a good survey of scholarly and normative works devoted to evaluating changes in Russian language usage; these sources appear in Cyrillic without translation in the form of a final bibliography (340–58).

Although the authors intend principally to give a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) account of Russian at the close of the twentieth century, they have much to say about how other specialists regard the changes taking place. They also begin their survey in 1917 rather than 1985, although linguistic developments of the communist era are already well documented in such works as The Russian language in the 20th century (Bernard Comrie, Gerald Stone, and Maria Polinsky, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Nevertheless, inclusion of this material provides a useful point of comparison for recent trends that might otherwise appear unique in the history of the language. In fact, Russian during the twentieth century has undergone several periods of rapid change, particularly in the early years of Bolshevik rule (1917–28). These years witnessed a significant renegotiation of the boundary between standard and substandard speech as well as seemingly irrevocable alterations in the status of religious and political terminology. Analogous processes are once again afoot, albeit sometimes in the opposite direction.

The book is divided into two parts of roughly equal length. The two chapters of Part 1 (3–165) describe innovations in vocabulary, recounting decade by decade the adoption or rejection of vast numbers of lexical items. The past fifteen years get an entire chapter to themselves, and they deserve one as more new vocabulary has entered Russian during this time than at any other since the early communist period. While English has adopted a mere handful of Russian words in this short time, it has unwittingly become the source of entire new vocabularies for post-communist Russia, donating such items as killer ‘assassin’, sejl ‘sale’, imidzh ‘public image’, electorat ‘voters’, and hundreds of others. New loans often trigger a restructuring in the function of native synonyms. These patterns, along with the unpredictable stylistic nuances the new loans themselves acquire, are explained on the basis of examples in context. Russian killer, for instance, turns out to be ‘somehow respectable, modern and even interesting’ (163) when compared to the old native ubijtsa ‘murderer’.

The remaining four chapters, packaged together as Part 2, are devoted to recent structural changes ranging from derivational morphology to syntax. Ch. 3 (169–239) discusses new word-formation models and recent extensions of old ones. Ch. 4 (240–82) covers new trends in case use and syntax; chief among these are the creation of plural forms for many singularia tantum nouns, an expanding usage of the accusative for marking negated direct objects, and the use of certain transitive verbs without an object. Most of these changes appear to be receiving momentum from the easing of the strict linguistic norms once enforced for all publishing and broadcasting. Ch. 5 (283–306) discusses the merry-go-round of place name changes that has again swept the country. The final chapter, entitled ‘The state of the language’, traces the origins of innovation to factors as diverse as youth slang and the poor speaking skills of Russia’s contemporary parliamentarians. The opinions of a variety of specialists, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to leading university grammarians, are also surveyed. The authors close with their own, rather positive assessment on the future evolution and international role of Russian.

This well researched and often entertaining book is essential reading...