Posted at 11:00 a.m.
Walking through the streets of St. Petersburg, reading the Russian media, I appreciate my multilingualism, because knowing Russian is no longer enough. Americanisms are ubiquitous, reflecting the pro-Western enthusiasm unleashed by Gorbachev and his entourage since the late 1980s.
Storefronts and apartments for sale proudly advertise in large Latin letters DIRTY. Despite legislation prohibiting it, English words (sometimes misspelled) remain the only indication of the nature of a business. More often, Americanisms are transliterated and written in Cyrillic letters, which helps to pronounce them, but not necessarily to understand them. co-working, retail, cleaner, speaker, street food, gaslighting, victim blaming (spelled in Russian as one word) are becoming common.
American terms, having absorbed Russian prefixes and suffixes and being declined and conjugated, become hardly recognizable even when fluent in English. I didn’t understand right away zakheitila derived from hurry, which means “she publicly expressed her hatred against someone”. Among the terms borrowed is also harassment, as if this phenomenon was unknown locally and had to be identified by a foreign word. Likewise, words like upgrade, workshop, cash back, baby sitter and boyfriend denote realities that have long existed in Russia and have corresponding terms in the Russian language.
The new terms gain prestige and exclusivity, leaving behind the “untrendy” ones. While young people use Americanisms with ease, older people find them confusing.
A young woman, during a radio interview, said that her grandmother keeps complimenting her on her grapefruit. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t tell the difference between boyfriend and grapefruit.
The Russian language is, of course, not in danger of extinction. Yet politicians have raised the issue of Americanisms in public forums. Valentina Matvienko, the president of the Council of the Federation, the Russian equivalent of the Canadian Senate, calls for legislative measures to stop the invasion of foreign words. This is a populist slogan reflecting current debates in Russian society. Many prominent intellectuals have long lamented the Americanization of everyday terms. They point to the provincialization of national culture that this entails: all foreign terms and realities are assumed to be American. I have noticed that current reissues of Russian classical literature often contain spelling mistakes in the French expressions used by the protagonists.
This very fact, the presence of Gallicisms and even entire pages written in French in Russian literature, as in War and peace of Tolstoy, is used by those who oppose legislative attempts to stem the tide of Americanization. They believe that the Russian language has always managed to domesticate successive waves of foreign terms: Dutch words when Peter the Great was modernizing the Russian navy, French words which entered under Catherine the Great and her successors, German technical terms with the establishment of German industries in Russia at the turn of the 20th centurye century.
Not just words
The sudden isolation in which Russia found itself led to a rethinking of the presence not only of American terms, but also of American concepts and institutions. Yet this is not a reaction to attempts to “cancel” Russian culture, including Tchaikovsky, in Europe or to dismantle monuments to Pushkin in Ukraine. According to a survey conducted at the end of May, only 10% of Russians questioned would approve of this type of revenge against Western culture or Ukrainian culture.
Arguments for a re-examination of Western norms and formats in post-Soviet life call for a “return to tradition”. This applies both to moral values (LGBT, etc.) and to institutional arrangements such as the Bologna process in higher education.
Although European in scope, this process introduced in Russia a few years ago is inspired by the American system, with the progression bachelor’s – master’s – Ph.D. It allows students to study across Europe where university courses are mutually recognized.
The Russian higher education system is of European origin, mainly German. It worked well for more than two centuries, and its abandonment had not only supporters. Three years ago, Vladimir Putin questioned the wisdom of imposing the imported framework on the training of Russian language teachers. In May, the Russian government finally decided to leave the Bologna process. In fact, this is a reaction to the Bologna group’s decision in April to exclude Russia, even though only 1% of Russian students take advantage of this privilege. Thus, both internal forces and external circumstances continue to distance Russia from the West.