SUMMARY
Compared to the length of language life, one or two decades are a very short span. One can hardly expect any significant changes in the language structure to take place within this period.
The reason why is evident; it is well-known that language is developing slowly, as it is conservative by nature.Yet even such a short period of time, which was the focus of attention of the authors of this book, supplies evidence of the existence of certain «growth points» characteristic of the development and functioning of the Russian language at the intersection of the 20th and the 21st centuries.
There are instances when these growth points indicate the changes in how the language is used by the speakers, i.e. in their speech practice. Quite a lot of such changes can be noticed without any special effort. This is true about the processes of active borrowing of foreign words, jargonization of speech and the shift of standard language speakers towards more liberal attitude to the «low» words, jargon and substandard speech in their everyday usage.
Among the results of the interaction between the standard language and nonstandard subsystems one can see the emergence of the so-called general slang, which is a phenomenon in-between the standard language and social jargons.
The processes of activization of borrowing and jargonization of standard speech, as well as general slang emergence, can be observed in all communication domains, public communication and mass media speech among them. The saturation of public speeches, newspaper articles, radio and TV programs with jargon words and phrases, as well as americanisms, has been stated repeatedly. Alongside with this, in the domain of public communication one can notice growth points of some other kind, such as the emergence and intensive development of new speech genres. The causes for the latter are mostly extralinguistic, such as, for instance, technical progress (e.g.
the emergence and development of the Internet), or the political and social restructuring of the society. Thus the liberalization of the political system and the freedom of showing one’s will and committing socially significant actions have resulted in the emancipation of speech behavior in such genres as interview, tele- and radiodiscussion, and in the emergence of types of public communication, which are new for the Russian society, such as various talk shows, teledebates, telebridges, etc.There are instances when «growth points» indicate the start of more profound processes in the Russian language, i.e. the processes affecting the relations between
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the language units and resulting in the restructuring of certain areas of the language system. This point can be illustrated by the changes in the case system and prepositional government, resulting in a tendency for replacing non-prepositional constructions with the prepositional ones. This tendency is part of the general process of analytical features development alongside with the spread of some prepositional constructions while some other synonymic constructions that have existed in the Russian language for quite a long time are becoming archaic. Another example of profound inner changes in the functioning and development of Modem Russian are changes in the course of phonetic processes and in the prosodic characteristics of both words and utterances.
Rather complicated and caused by various factors, linguistic, as well as communicative and social, are semantic changes in the lexicon. They are indicative of changes in the synonymic, antonymic and other types of paradigmatic relations between words that enter lexical classes and form new lexical pairs and sets, which is symptomatic of forming new relations between vocabulary units and, besides, reflects the processes of reconsidering and reevaluation of certain communicatively relevant lexical classes by the speakers.
It is worth mentioning one more type of «growth points», namely the shifts in the society’s attitude to language.
The society, in particular its most educated and socially active groups, have begun to look more closely at what is happening with the Russian language and to give its evaluations of it. The evidence of this is not only a violent reaction of press, electronic mass media, writers, politicians, and representatives of other social groups to the suggestions of changes in orthography made by linguists, but also various public discussions that take place on the radio, TV, in press, and in the Internet, of the problems of modem Russian, its impoverishment, coarsening, clogging with unnecessary loanwords, jargon, substandard phrases, etc.Of special interest is the comparison between the active processes in the Russian language on the territories of its traditional long-standing existence and the situation of the Russian language in the Russian diaspora abroad and its changes in foreign surrounding. The problems of the language of the mother country and of the emigration are of different nature. Thus, for the Russian language abroad it is relevant whether it is going to be preserved by the middle and, especially, the young generation of emigrants. The same is irrelevant for the Russian language of the mother country, or relevant in a different way (the protection of the language against unnecessary intensive borrowing, from the invasion of nonstandard language means, language policy directed at the support of the Russian language as the state language , etc.).
The data obtained in the process of the research hint that the degree of Russian language preservation by Russian emigrants depends on a number of cultural, social, psychological and other factors, on how much attention is paid to the mother tongue in the process of communication within the family, on ambitions and values, and on many other things. The main conclusion the research suggests is that the Russian language abroad lives and is not going to die.
It is self-evident that this book has not addressed all active processes that can be observed in the Russian language at the intersection of the two centuries. However, we have been continuing our research and hope to be able to present its results in the publications to come.
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