The Role of English in the Changing Language Situation in Ukraine
Anatolij Dorodnych
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
The paper concerns the progress of the author’s research previously reported at the Globe2002 conference in Warsaw.
Since then the influence of English has become even more evident. Some years ago, loan-words from English were more typical of genres immediately involved with the revolutionary changes in the post-Soviet political and economic scene. Our data suggest that even then loaned words often changed their conceptual and/or axiological (associative) meaning. A good example would be the English acronym PR, which has given rise to quite a few words in Russian and Ukrainian: piar, piarshchik (in Russian, the meaning is close to the English ‘spin doctor’), chorny piar (meaning ‘slander campaign’).
Now the loans from English are being quickly assimilated into colloquial Russian and Ukrainian via both standard speech and slang. This is particularly evident in the speech of young people, especially computer enthusiasts and music fans, who come into direct contact with the English language that dominates these areas of activity.
For the young computer users the mechanism seems to work like this: first, they encounter standard terminology, then by and by, with the terminology assimilated, they start clipping the words or russifying them by adding Russian (Ukrainian) affixes and inflections. But they do not stop there. The next stage is creating slang words, very often pejorizing the original term, like, e.g., creating pisiuk for PC (suggesting the diminutive for what males urinate from) or A¶ka (hypocoristic name for ICQ). The use of acronyms on Internet chat comes so natural, that some of them have already appeared in conversation.
Remarkably, Internet users seem to have started developing a new kind of slang – wrtitten slang.
The fans of punk rock, techno, rap, etc. are mostly content with russifying Anglo-Saxon forms.
One interesting feature about Ukrainian colloquialisms and slang words is that nationalism, which is obvious in the strong tendency to distance standard Ukrainian as far from standard Russian as possible, is not felt in the informal speech of young Ukrainians, which is replete with slang words loaned from Russian, including those based on English (shall we say American?) roots.The contacts with American culture are a feature of everyday life and teenagers sprinkle their speech with interjections like Super!, Wow!, and even more obscene ones.
The Russian/Ukrainian material analysed so far seems to confirm the hypothesis that globalization is about the domain-related spread of global registers rather than languages (Machin and Leeuwen, 2003:493; Blommaert, 2003:608), and that the impact of (American) English is “restricted to particular groups” (Blommaert, 2003:609).
On the other hand, although ‘economic determinism’ is much maligned nowadays, the data we have for Russia and Ukraine point to the fact that, at the end of the day, there is an economic factor behind the import of Americam (mass) culture and American discourse practices.
References:
Blommaert, Jan, 2003. “Commentary: A sociolinguistics of globalization.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4, 607-623
Machin, David and Theo van Leeuwen, 2003. “Global schemas and local discourses in Cosmopolitan.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4, 493-512