Derek Offord - Using Russian - A Guide to Contemporary Usage

subst

substantivised

iron

ironical

SW

South-West

lit

literally

tech

technical

loc

locative

theat

theatrical

m

masculine

vulg

vulgar

The Russian particle -нибу´дь is frequently abbreviated to -н.

xxxiii

1 Varieties of language and register

1.1

The Russian language and its distribution

The Russian language belongs to the East Slav group of languages,

itself part of the Slavonic branch of the Indo-European family. The

relationship of Russian to the other modern European languages is

illustrated by Figure 1 (which includes only languages still used by substantial numbers of speakers).

It is difficult to give accurate up-to-date figures for the number of people for whom Russian is their native or first language, or at least their first language for some purpose or purposes (e.g. professional or social). This difficulty arises for several reasons. Firstly, we are dealing with several different categories of user, including the following: ethnic Russians who are citizens of the Russian Federation; ethnic Russians who are citizens of other former republics of the Soviet Union;

members of other ethnic groups who are citizens of the Russian

Federation; and members of other ethnic groups who are citizens of

other former republics of the Soviet Union but who continue to use

Russian at work or at home, perhaps because their community or

family is mainly Russian-speaking. It is not always easy to define

whether Russian is the first or second language of at least the latter two groups. Secondly, there has been much migration between the regions

and states of the former Soviet Union since the collapse of the Union in 1991, with the result that numbers and proportions of ethnic

Russians or other speakers of Russian in each former republic may

have changed significantly over the last thirteen years. Thirdly,

considerable numbers of both ethnic Russians and members of

non-Russian ethnic groups who grew up in Russia or the Soviet

Union using Russian as their first language have in the same period

emigrated from the Russian Federation to countries outside the

former Soviet Union. The number of Jews in the Russian Federation,

for example, fell from roughly 540,000 in 1989 to 230,000 in 2002 and the number of Russian Germans has declined over the same period

from 840,000 to 600,000. It is difficult to determine how many

émigrés continue to use Russian as their first language, or for how

long they do so, after their emigration.

The most easily quantifiable group of Russian-speakers, of course, is the citizenry of the Russian Federation, of which Russian is the official language. According to the census of the Russian Federation carried

out in 2002, the population of the Federation was a little over 145

million, 1 of whom some 116 million (i.e. almost 80 per cent) describe themselves as ethnically Russian.

1

1

Varieties of language and register

Greek

Albanian

Armenian

Russian

Belarusian

(i.e. Belorussian,

White Russian)

Ukrainian

East Slavonic

Other

Slavonic

Serbo-Croat

Slovene

Bulgarian

Macedonian

South Slavonic

Latvian

Lithuanian

Czech

Slovak

Polish

West Slavonic

Baltic

Irish

Welsh

Breton

Celtic

French

Spanish

Portuguese

Italian

Romanian

Romance

languages

Danish

Swedish

Norwegian

Icelandic

North Germanic

opean

Germanic

Indo-Eur

The

1.

English

German

Dutch

Flemish

West Germanic

Fig.

1.1

The Russian language and its distribution

Among the remaining 20 per cent, or approximately 29 million, of

the population of the Russian Federation (many of whom will also

consider Russian their first language) 160 nationalities were

represented, according to the 2002 census. The largest of these

non-Russian groups, in descending order, were Tatars (of whom there

were over five million), Ukrainians (almost three million, although

their number in the Russian Federation has been decreasing), Bashkirs and Chuvashes (over a million each), and Chechens and Armenians

(also over a million each, and their numbers in the Russian Federation have been increasing). Figure 2 shows the composition of the population of the Russian Federation by ethnic group, as revealed by the 2002 census.

Of the non-Russian citizens of the Federation the Ukrainians and

Belorussians (whose numbers in the Russian Federation have also been decreasing) are ethnically close to the Russians. Their languages (i.e.

Ukrainian and Belorussian respectively) are closely related to Russian, which Ukrainians and Belorussians are likely also to speak with native or near-native facility. However, many of the non-Russian citizens of the Russian Federation (e.g. Estonians, Kazakhs, Latvians) belong to quite different ethnic groups from the Russians, including

non-European groups. They may therefore speak a language that is

only distantly related to Russian (e.g. Latvian, which is also

Indo-European) or that belongs to a different linguistic group (e.g.

Estonian, which is a Finno-Ugric language, or Kazakh, which is a

Turkic language). 2 These non-Russian citizens of the Federation have varying degrees of command of Russian. A substantial number of them

consider Russian their first language.

It needs to be borne in mind, incidentally, that different Russian

terms are used to denote the different types of ‘Russian’ who have

been identified in the preceding paragraphs. The substantivised

adjective ру´сский (f ру´сскaя) denotes a person who is ethnically

Russian. Used as an adjective, this word also denotes the Russian

language (ру´сский язы´к). The noun россия´нин (f россия´нкa), on the other hand, conveys the broader concept of a person who is a citizen of the Russian Federation but who is not necessarily ethnically

Russian. The adjective росси´йский has a correspondingly broader

sense than the adjective ру´сский, as, for example, in the name of the country itself (Pосси´йскaя eдeрa´ция), which denotes a political rather than an ethnic, linguistic or cultural entity.

The numbers of ethnic Russian and non-Russian speakers of

Russian outside the Russian Federation are more difficult to quantify.

Some idea of their number can be gauged from the fact that at the

time of the 1989 census (the last census carried out in the Soviet era) there were 25 million ethnic Russians living in other republics of the Soviet Union (see 6.11.1 for a list of these republics), the majority of them in Ukraine. Moreover, since Russian was used as a second

language throughout the non-Russian areas of the Union, whose total

3

1

Varieties of language and register

census

2002

the

to

ding

accor,

roupg

ethnicyb

ederationF

Russian

the

of

opulationP

2.

Fig.

1.1

The Russian language and its distribution

population in 1989 was 287 million, one may assume that the language was used as a first or second language by at least a further 50 million Soviet citizens. However, the status of the Russian language is now