June 06, 2019

Why some Russian politicians try to ban English words

located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

The sixth of June is the birthday of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and logically, the day has been celebrated as the Russian Language Day in the country.

Some Russian lawmakers take the celebration the language of Pushkin as far as offering bills that ban foreign words such as 'blockchain', 'mainstream' or 'mining' – words widely used in Russia for years.

"We ought to think about substituting the words used in digital technology", a member of the Russian parliament, State Duma, Alexander Yushenko proposed. His colleague Sergei Zhigarev went event farther by proposing to wipe from the Russian language words like 'robot', 'artificial intelligence', 'big data', and 'cryptocurrency' – all of them have been common in Russian usage too.

Even Joseph Stalin wrote in 1950 that "continuous growth of industry, agriculture, and science demands new words and expressions to appear." Modern Russian linguistics purists say nothing new because three centuries ago Russian Slavofils also called to ban foreign (then mostly French) words, including those which have acquired legal Russian citizenship in the following decades and centuries. Alexander Shishkov, the most vocal advocate of language purism, in 1803 called not to use "ugly" foreign words and create Russian substitutions in case there were no native analogues.

Attempts to 'naturalise' foreign words come from a fear that native language would lose the battle with the foreign ones, a professor in the High School of Economics Mira Bergelson says. She reminds us that when French ultra-purists banned English terminology altogether, French science has degraded rapidly.

Attempts to clear the Russian language from "imports" have been political rather than philological, chief editor of the 21st Century Dictionaries project Alexei Mikheev is convinced. "The underlying reason is that the import of vocabulary has been a direct result of the import of technologies from the leading English-speaking country. Since a country has been declared unfriendly in Russia, politicians want to weaken its influence, including the language domain", he says. Notably, there are no British, American, Canadian or Australian politicians who call to find substitutions for the words in, say,

Chinese, like feng shui or chi kung, despite Beijing, has been a strategic opponent of these countries. This is counterproductive to translating technical terminology, Mikheev stresses. "Both languages and technologies must help humanity to build bridges, not walls. The scientific progress would stop unless all scientists develop a common language. The legend about the Tower of Babylon is exactly about that", he says.