A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Word Borrowing Patterns in Putin’s Russia

In this study, the focus is on the development of word borrowing patterns in the sociocultural climate of Putin’s Russia. In the 1990s, Russia was going through a period of infatuation with western cultures, politically aligning itself with the United States. Simultaneously, the Russian language adopted many loan words from American English (e.g., Ryzanova-Clarke, & Wade, 1999; Stakhnevich, 2003.) Today, the sociopolitical conditions are drastically different. In this project, I explore the longevity of the linguistic borrowings from the 1990s and identify new loanwords through the textual analysis of Russian print mass media. I examine the semantic domains of these borrowings from the standpoint of critical discourse analysis and investigate the loans’ morphological structure and their syntactical role(s). In my interpretation of the results, I rely on the notions from the critical theory to explicate the role of cross-linguistic borrowings in discourse and their connection to social change