Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 8 – Vladimir Putin
has made the Russian language the unifying center of his vision of the Russian
nation and the Russian world, but the appearance of multiple Russian languages
or dialects is very much a fact of life, something “one can love or hate but
cannot possibly be indifferent to,” according to one linguist
A web portal in the Urals says that
the Urals dialect of Russia is sufficiently distinct that those who do not know
it may have difficulty making purchases in stores there, arranging to meet with
others, or even carrying on conversations about nominally every day matters and
has offered its visitors a test to determine how well they “speak” Urals (ural.ulmart.ru/).
More significantly and intriguingly,
linguistics expert Maksim Krongauz argues that the emergence of such regional
variations is an example of glocalization, the process by which globalization as
produced by the Internet is generating localism in response. It is a process he
welcomes but many may not (snob.ru/selected/entry/116140).
Indeed, he says, “the more Russian
languages there are, the better it will be for the Russian language,” a view
that Putin and his ministers of culture and education among others almost
certainly would dissent from especially if such “Russian languages”
increasingly lead their speakers to distance themselves from Moscow.
Russians like everyone else now find
themselves in “completely new circumstances” thanks to the Internet which is
having an unprecedented impact on language. “Many languages are changing” and
in a similar direction: there is an ever smaller gap between written and oral
speech. That has the effect of increasing diversity and reducing uniformity.
In his 2007 book, “The Russian
Language on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown,” Kongrauz argued that this should
not disturb anyone because “rumors about the rapid death of Russian are
strongly exaggerated.” But what is emerging is something new with both pleasing
and displeasing aspects.
He says that as a linguist, he is
pleased to have all this new material to study but that as a speaker of
Russian, he is sometimes horrified by the kind of language that is emerging out
of slang or vulgar expressions – and by the speed with which the Internet
promotes the acceptance of these as almost standard speech.
Within a single generation, he
continues, there can now be quite significant distancing of one group of
speakers of a language from another, a pace never before encountered in human
history. But that is a good thing, if
one accepts it in a critical way. “The Russian language now is at a stage of
unusual flourishing,” Krongauz says.
That it is reflects the appearance “of
new variants of the Russian language.”
As a result, everyone should recognize and welcome the fact that “the
greater number of variants there are, the more Russian languages there appear,
the better the Russian language will feel” and the longer it will survive.
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