Шаповалова Е. Н.

Шаповалова Е. Н.

Научный руководитель: ст. преп. Бекрешева Л. А.

(г. Луганск, ЛНР) 

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE BORROWINGS IN THE SPEECH OF RUSSIAN YOUTH 

The time of active development of business, new technologies, and therefore widening of international contacts become the basis for the language borrowing process. Today, English-language borrowings have a huge impact on the development and change of the Russian language, which means that the relevance of this topic is obvious.

For a modern person, knowledge of a foreign language becomes not only a prestigious phenomenon, but also an increase in demand on the labor market. The Russian language is actively being filled with English-language vocabulary, replacing many Russian-language words. The prestige of the English language proficiency partially explains this phenomenon, i.e. the status of the native word decreases, and the English-speaking word is perceived as a language standard.

The Linguistic Dictionary gives the following definition of borrowing: “Borrowing is an element of a foreign language (a word, a morpheme, a syntactic construction...) transferred from one language to another as a result of language contacts” [3, p. 259].

L. P. Krysin identifies the following reasons for borrowings:

·        the need for naming a new thing, a new phenomenon, etc.: cinema, computer, file;

·        the need to distinguish meaningfully close, but still different concepts; for example, pairs of words like fear – panic, laptop – netbook;

·        the need for specialization of concepts in a particular area, for certain purposes; for example, pairs of the type removal – export, converter – transformer;

·        the desire for non-separateness of the name, i.e. the desire to designate it with one word, not a phrase; safe – fireproof cabinet, sprinter – short-distance runner;

·        in the borrowing language the presence of established systems of terms that serve a particular thematic area more or less unified according to the source of borrowing of these terms: a good example is the term system used in computer technology: this area is becoming overgrown with new English-language nominations; processor, user;

·        socio-psychological reasons and factors of borrowing: perception by the whole team of speakers or part of it of a foreign language word as more prestigious (compared to the native one): print instead of узор, blazer instead of приталенный пиджак [2, p. 146–147].

Globalization creates a favorable attitude of society to the process of borrowing. If in the 40s of the previous century the society had a negative attitude to borrowing, because it considered it a worship of Western civilization, then in the late 80s-early 90s, such political, economic and cultural conditions arose that determined the predisposition of Russian society to adopt a new and widespread use of borrowed lexicon [2, p. 143].

Young people are more willing to use borrowed words. It is because young people always strive for everything new and unusual. They want to contrast themselves with the older generation as more advanced and progressive. Besides, the youth aspires to the Internet as a source of information, and it opens up to them phenomena and objects of Western culture that have never existed in our country, and therefore there are no such words in the Russian language. This naturally leads to the fact that these words are borrowed from the language of the country that presents this phenomenon to young people. In addition, borrowings help teenagers to identify their belonging to a special team that is not like others: knifers, fire spinners, killfers, etc.

The most usual spheres where the young people use borrowings are:

·     fashion (look, hoody, skinny);

·     Internet (web, blog, device, monitoring, traffic);

·     computer games (gosu – experienced gamer, lag – latency in the game, buffing – temporary improvement of certain characteristics of the game character);

·     cinema and music (thriller, blockbuster, remake, disc jockey, rock ‘ n ‘ roll);

·     sport (freestyle, kickboxing, play-off) [1];

·     leisure streams (iphoneographers – people making and demonstrating photo in social nets, remoters – a group of people that meet at a special place, put on earphones, listen to instructions and go and do what an administrator dictates them; killfers – those who do extremal selfies, etc.)

The greater social prestige of a foreign-language word, in comparison with the native one, sometimes causes a phenomenon that can be called an increase in rank: a word that in the source language names an ordinary object, in the borrowing language is attached to an object, in one sense or another more significant, more prestigious, etc. So, the French word boutique means ‘a small shop’; being borrowed by the Russian language, acquires the meaning of ‘fashion clothing store’ [1];

We don’t speak of terms that name new inventions, which have no Russian equivalents. Youth language uses borrowings where a Russian word could be used successfully. Thus a youth language is a type of social slang. Youth slang is its own almost closed linguistic system, which has very little effect on the language. In narrow social groups (young people are among them), the language can change greatly, but only a tiny part of youth slang passes into the “adult” language. And even then, for the most part, it remains somewhere at the level of a passive vocabulary. It seems like you understand, but you don’t use it yourself.

To fix our language unchanged forever, of course, is impossible, so borrowing is a natural and unavoidable process.

 

ЛИТЕРАТУРА

1. Баранковская, А. И. Англицизмы в современной русской молодёжной речи. [Электронный ресурс]. / А. И. Баранковская – Режим доступа : http://conf.omua.ru/content/anglicizmy-v-sovremennoy-russkoy-molodezhnoy-rechi (дата обращения 01.11.21).

2. Крысин, Л. П. Иноязычное слово в контексте современной общественной жизни / Л. П. Крысин // Русский язык конца XX столетия (1985–1995).– М. : Язык русской культуры, 1996. – С. 142–155.

3. Языкознание. Большой энциклопедический словарь / гл. ред. В. Н. Ярцева. – 2-е изд.– М. : Большая Российская энциклопедия, 1998. – 685 с.