New Concepts and Words in Post-Soviet Russia

The research of Anglicisms in European languages is a part of the project supervised by the scholars from the University of Cologne. The adaptation of loan words in the Russian language possesses some social and cultural peculiarities in contrast to other European countries due to the drastic political changes and dynamic introduction of the market economy. The investigation is based on the linguistic and social analysis of Anglicisms, which were imported into Russian in the late 90-s and the beginning of the new millennium. The research focus is concentrated on the study of the most frequent terms circulating on the pages of professional (literary, business, political) and other mass media sources. Three groups of the latest borrowings are discussed: neutral terms, which have proved to be rather stable within 20 years; expressive fashionable neologisms with the restricted sphere of application and evaluative words revealing either Western cultural values or socially marked concepts, typical of post-socialism.