"There is no death or degradation of the Russian language": an interview with linguist Maxim Krongauz

Lifehacker talked with a scientist and found out why online communication contributes to the development of illiteracy, what to do to enrich your vocabulary and whether films will help in this matter. We also learned how linguists understand that it is time to add a certain word to the dictionary, and why the rules of the Russian language change so slowly.

About linguistics

Why did you decide to study languages?

I decided not to study languages, but to do linguistics - that is, to study language as a universal mechanism. And the immediate stimulus was the interest in the native language - Russian. Linguistics is a diverse science, and its representatives are no less diverse. For example, there are linguists who study theory.

I am more interested in living language. Therefore, I focused on studying modern Russian - over the past decades I have been trying to understand how and why it is changing. And it happens pretty quickly. So the research process has become a kind of race for language.

What is happening in the world with the language now?

With languages or language - these are different issues. I will focus on Russian. There are several factors that strongly influence it and lead to change. Although a lot of what I will list applies to other large languages as well.

Social factor. For us, this was the perestroika of 1985-1991. The desire for absolute freedom at that time led to intense changes in the language. Native speakers happily broke all the rules, including spelling, shattered norms, used swearing, vernacular, jargon.
Technological progress and the emergence of new types of communication. The emergence of the Internet has led to the emergence of new communication spaces with unprecedented communication conditions. Even the invention of the mobile phone led to the formation of a new communication space. For example, the formula of goodbye "before the call" arose thanks to active communication on a mobile phone. At the same time, our pace of life accelerated, which led to the compression of some words. For example, in SMS we write "ATP", not "thank you". These are obvious and superficial examples, but in reality the changes are deeper.
Globalization, which manifests itself in the form of the impact of English on Russian and other large languages. It affects English itself, but in a slightly different way. An example would be the emergence of Global English, a simplified version of this language.

About dictionaries and rules of the Russian language

How do linguists understand that it is time to add a certain word to the dictionary? Or what needs to be said in this way and not otherwise?

This is a very complex issue, and in linguistic traditions - both in different and within one - it is solved in different ways. The Russian lexicographic tradition is rather conservative.

In our country, dictionaries of new words have traditionally been published. The word had to spend some time in them before getting into the large dictionary of the Russian language - for example, in the explanatory or spelling. This is a kind of purgatory. If the word behaved well - it was used actively, then after some time (five or more years) it could be included in the usual dictionary of the literary Russian language.

And this adherence to tradition is largely preserved to this day. Therefore, Russian dictionaries are very far behind our speech today. Many words that we already actively use have difficulty making their way into them. In my opinion, this is a problem. And I am not at all conservative in this matter.

Now linguists are actively discussing what form of the dictionary we will come to in the near future. It seems to me that the Internet gives us the opportunity to create a new type of source - a speed dictionary. We will be able to record new words in it, even if they will not take root in the future. Naturally, with the appropriate marks: it appeared then - it has not been found since such and such time. But he is not yet.

If some words are not in the dictionary, and people use them, it turns out that they are not speaking correctly?

You are driving the existing conservative trend to the point of absurdity. I do not believe that we are speaking incorrectly if we use a word that has not yet entered existing dictionaries. For example, no one blames people for illiteracy if they say the word "HYIP". The absence of many new words in the dictionary speaks more about the lagging behind our lexicographic tradition.

But what about the situation with the word "coffee"? It has only recently become possible to use it in the neuter genus - and at the same time not be considered illiterate

This is a different problem and must be considered separately. "Coffee" has not ceased to be a masculine word. It's just that linguists recognized the neuter gender as not even equal, but acceptable. Less correct, but still within the framework of the literary norm. This is absolutely the right decision, because "coffee" has been used for more than a century in the neuter genus too. Well-educated native speakers do the same.

Of course, we all learned in school that it is correct to say "black coffee", and if we use "black", then this is a gross mistake. But in the texts of well-known, respected and, of course, literate writers, for example, Konstantin Paustovsky, there is also "coffee" in the neuter gender. It was applied by the author, and the editor and proofreader allowed it. So the expression in this case went through a whole chain of checks.

By changing the rule, we really made it so that most of the Russian speakers ceased to be considered illiterate. There is nothing wrong. And if I want to, I can continue to use the masculine gender.

Why was the change in the rules so slow?

In different dictionaries, this happened at different times. So, some of them have long admitted the neuter gender for the word "coffee". But in 2009-2010, journalists noticed a change in the dictionary, which was included in the list of recommended ones. As a result, a whole scandal unfolded around the lexeme.

The reaction of cultural carriers to such changes is always negative. Because they knew that "coffee" was masculine. And this distinguished the cultural carrier from the uncultured one. And the admission of the neuter has led to the fact that this advantage has disappeared. People felt hurt - and this gave rise to many conflicts and jokes.

Someone said they wouldn’t drink coffee anymore. Others suggested that black coffee was bad coffee (or bad) and black coffee was good. A cultured native speaker is conservative and doesn't want him to change. But this is inevitable: sometimes transformations take place within the language. The addition of the neuter is precisely an internal process.

In Russian, words that end in "e" are usually neuter. And this applies only to those words in which "e" is the end. That is, in the words of the declined, for example, in the "sea". And for the unwilling words, "e" or "o" ("coat" or "coffee") is not an ending, so they should not follow this rule.

A more modern example is the "euro", which immediately began to be used in the masculine gender. Probably influenced by the word "dollar". But gradually he was drawn into the neuter group. Because the "euro", although it was indestructible, ended in "o". And so it began to behave like a lexeme with such an ending (for example, "window"). The same thing happened with "coffee". In common parlance, he was used in the neuter, and sometimes even bowed down.

On the "purity" of the language, Internet slang and literacy

How do you feel about people who advocate a certain "purity" of the language and protest against borrowing?

In the language, there is always a struggle between conservatives and innovators. If we jump back two centuries, we will inevitably stumble upon a dispute between Slavophiles and Westernizers. And the name of Admiral Alexander Shishkov will also surface, who offered Russian options to foreign borrowings. This controversy continues today. And here there is no right or wrong: it is always a matter of measure and taste.

I am by no means a conservative. I believe that the language is forced to change. Including because a lot of borrowings come into it. But the pace for me, as a native speaker, and not a linguist, is also not always pleasant and comfortable. It upsets me when in the text I come across unfamiliar terms that need to be searched not in dictionaries, but on the Internet. And in some situations, I would prefer to use Russian words, simply because they are more familiar.

But we have largely forgotten how to develop Russian counterparts to borrowing. And the so-called guardians of the native language are still losing the fight.

How did the advent of the Internet affect languages?

This is a huge topic, so I'll cover a few basic things. The speed of information dissemination on the Internet is very high. This creates special conditions for the existence of the word.

And fashion begins to play a big role. It has always existed in the language, but not on such a scale. Today the word can rise to the peak of popularity, and after a while (often short) disappear from the language altogether.

But there are also long-lived words. Earlier I gave an example of "HYIP". It almost instantly became popular, until it disappears and is even very actively used.

First of all, it was associated with rap culture, but then very quickly entered the general space and began to be found in the speech of a variety of people. And he has every chance of becoming an ordinary word that is part of the Russian language.

Also one of the very important phenomena in the language of the Internet is the concept of "meme". It can be compared to winged words and expressions that have existed for a very long time. But the meme is fundamentally different from traditional catchphrases: unlike them, it lives for a relatively short time - a week, a month. It's good if it's a year. At the same time, memes appear constantly, and this is a sign of the language of the Internet.

It is important to understand that it is not the result that is important, but the very process of their generation. That is, before the process itself was launched relatively rarely, and its results - words - lived for a long time (centuries or decades). But now the opposite is true: words are forgotten quite quickly, but they are invented almost every day.

What other examples are there? You seem to have mentioned word compression earlier?

There are other examples of the influence of the Internet on the language. It requires speed, so word compression is a pretty vivid sign of it. For example, we write "ATP" instead of "thank you" or "greetings" rather than "hello".

Another example is abbreviations. Thanks to the Internet, an abbreviation that is not very familiar to the Russian language has appeared. In the past, we overwhelmingly abbreviated expressions centered on the noun. For example, CSKA is the Central Army Sports Club. The key word is "club".

And due to the rise of the Internet and the influence of the English language, abbreviations of expressions that are not necessarily associated with a noun began to appear in large numbers. This is pretty standard in English. For example, ASAP (As Soon As Possible) - "as fast as possible."

And some of these abbreviations have penetrated into the Russian language. For example, "IMHO" (imho - in my humble opinion) - "in my humble opinion." Russian abbreviations also appeared. For example, "syow" - "today I found out." And in the zero years, I ran into "ttt" - "pah-pah-pah."

Why do we communicate differently on the Internet?

Typically, written speech is large texts: monologues, novels, articles. And the emergence of the Internet led to the fact that it began to be actively used in conversation.

We chat in writing. Therefore, there was a need to revitalize this speech, because it is much drier than oral. It lacks intonation, facial expressions, gestures.

Therefore, a lot of the language game has appeared in Internet communication, which I spoke about earlier. And then there were emoticons - this is another example of the noticeable influence of the Internet on the language.

Are emoticons and emojis already part of the language?

Emoticons (though not all), definitely. And emoji to a much lesser extent. Although they are part of our communication system, they are still pictures, not linguistic signs. The latter primarily include a smiley-smile and a frown smiley.

Emoticons compete with punctuation marks, such as displacing a period. They are fully integrated into the linguistic system in the broad sense of the word.

Does the Internet contribute to the development of illiteracy? Why it happens?

There is a very large degree of freedom and language play on the Internet. This affects the handling of words, with their graphic appearance. In Russian, this is primarily due to the subculture of padonki, which arose at the very end of the 20th century and spread in the 2000s.

And, of course, during perestroika, people wanted to get as much freedom as possible, and from everything, including the spelling rules. Then it became fashionable to write with errors, but not with any, but with those that are also uncharacteristic for illiterate people. For example, use the word "hello" instead of "hello".

The era of the "language of the bastards" existed for quite a long time - about 10 years. This influenced the error tolerance. Because a deviation from the spelling rules, admitted in a playful manner, is forgivable. And thanks to this, it was possible to overcome the shame of illiteracy that existed in the minds of Soviet people.

Because it is impossible to fully communicate on the Internet if you are afraid of making a mistake. So the noughties helped to make a choice in favor of communication and communication, rather than literacy.

The fashion for the "language of bastards" has passed, but the freedom of handling written speech has been preserved. And today everyone writes due to their own literacy or illiteracy. If the answer to the question is quite simple, then literacy implies a system of prohibitions and restrictions, and the Internet is initially a space of freedom that spills over into freedom.

Language is moving towards simplicity. Can such changes be called evolution then?

Can. Only by the evolution of not the whole language, but its part. For example, a period at the end of a message disappears because its absence does not interfere with understanding. We do not omit it in every sentence, but at the end of a short message, which is already framed.

If you follow the rules, then you need to put a full stop, but nothing terrible will happen if you don't. The interlocutor is unlikely to think that you are illiterate. Now, many generally perceive it as a special sign expressing the seriousness or dissatisfaction of the writer.

In any case, such simplifications are associated with human laziness. Linguists call this the principle of economy, but this is, in fact, laziness.

Can such simplifications pass over time into business correspondence, books, media articles?

I would like to answer that no. These are different areas. Business correspondence should be more literate and follow the established rules, rather than fashion trends. This manner should not be carried over to books either. And the journalist should not omit the point.

Nevertheless, ordinary written speech has some influence on what is outside its sphere. But nothing can be predicted here. Perhaps a clear border will remain, or maybe some things will cease to be of principle.

But I do not see a threat to ordinary written language yet. Except when I read sports reports: in them I often encounter illiteracy. The reason is that it is more important for the author to quickly write the news and communicate something to the reader than to consult a dictionary.

How do you feel about people who call themselves Grammar-Nazi?

The Grammar Nazis do not just point out illiteracy and try to make speech better. They use it as an argument in an argument: if you make a grammatical mistake, you can't be right. So they discredit the interlocutor.

It always seemed to me that their position is vulnerable because they interfere with communication. Today, the behavior of the Grammar Nazi no longer seems to me an urgent topic for discussion. Recently, they have come to be seen as a kind of trolls that interfere with communication.

Now we admit a certain illiteracy of our interlocutor. Everyone writes because of their literacy, and people are free to form their own opinion about him. That is, some errors can indeed be viewed as defamatory. However, more often the position of a person is still more important than his level of knowledge of the rules of the language in this discussion.

What misconceptions annoy you the most as a linguist?

I am insanely annoyed by the myth about the death of the Russian language. Because the biggest threat to him is when he disappears from communication, communication. But the Russian language is actively used - we speak it and correspond. So we are not talking about any death and degradation. Of course, you need to worry about your native language. But crying like that annoys me. This is often a manipulation of public opinion.

The problem is only in one area - in science and scientific texts. There are tendencies that are dangerous for the language. Many scholars write articles in English. This is understandable: the author wants to be known about his work all over the world. But if all good scientists switch to English, then we will lose the terminology, and hence the Russian language in this area.

About politeness and speech development

How can strangers treat each other neutrally and respectfully?

There has always been a simple rule in Russian etiquette: if you know the name of the interlocutor (it doesn't matter - name or first name and patronymic), then use it in communication, otherwise it will not be very polite. Today this rule has been partially broken.

There are a huge number of references in Russian. Various forms of kinship are actively used, for example, "brother", "sister", "aunt", "uncle", "mother". And the taxi driver is often referred to as "boss" or "commander".

But all these are informal phrases that are appropriate only if we want to close the distance. And there is no neutral address in the Russian language. And if you do not know the name of the interlocutor, then you do not need to use the contact forms at all.

And how, then, to call out to a person, for example, on a bus?

Just use words from speech etiquette - "sorry", "sorry". If I want to attract attention, I do not say "monsieur" or "Frau", but "Sorry, you dropped your keys." This is enough for polite communication.

Why is it customary for us to address some people with you, and others with you? In many languages of European countries, the second option is no longer used. Will it be like that in Russian too?

Hopefully not, because I'm not too keen on simplifying this system. And when you talk about many European countries, you are not quite right. Of course, this is no longer in English, as in some others. And there are those countries where the scope of using "you" has simply narrowed. But the word still did not disappear.

I believe that such democratization is completely optional. And I don't think there is a tendency to simplify this system. Rather, it is important for English as a world language.

Versatility is really critical there. In any situation, I should not think about how to address a person. And other languages may well retain some nuances, more complex systems and subsystems.

"You" and "you" are an extremely interesting and complex system. And its description is an important part of the linguistic study of language. As a linguist, I love maintaining complexity. And as a carrier is used to it, and I have no need to wish for changes.

Perhaps this simplification is more relevant for young people who are more influenced by globalization.

How to enrich your vocabulary?

Read.

What to read? Classics? Or is it already out of date?

Deprecated, but still useful. If you want to enrich your language, then you need to read everything: modern books, non-fiction, Soviet literature, classics of the 19th century.

Of course, if you read old literature, you will use words that younger interlocutors may not know. But you will have a large vocabulary, which is also useful because vocabulary reveals the richness of the world.

Can films with good dialogues be as useful for the development of speech as books?

Films with good dialogue may not be useful, and films with bad ones may not. Good dialogue is how we talk. This is natural spoken language, and we use a small vocabulary in it.

And in "bad" dialogues, unnatural words can often be used, which are usually not pronounced in normal oral speech. But it's still a sophisticated and challenging way of restocking. Simple - to read a variety of literature.

Life hacking from Maxim Krongauz

Books

I recommend the book of my student, a serious and interesting linguist, Irina Fufaeva - "How are women called". This work is devoted to the topic of feminitives, which is actively discussed in society, and the author demonstrates a really reasonable view of this issue.

Another close colleague of mine, Alexander Piperski, wrote the book "Construction of Languages", for which he received the "Enlightener" award. In it, he talks about artificial languages and how they are invented. I also advise.

I would recommend my books. The most famous of them is "The Russian Language on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown", which is dedicated to the very processes that we discussed in this interview. Its continuation was a book dedicated to the development of the language on the Internet - "Self-study book of Albansky", where Albansky is such a slang name for the Russian language on the Internet.

And already in co-authorship with five young colleagues, the book "Dictionary of the Internet.ru" was published, which became an attempt to fix the words and expressions of the Russian language that are relevant for Internet communication. Also, together with other authors, we released "One hundred languages: the universe of words and meanings."

Video

Here I, perhaps, digress from linguistic topics. I enjoy watching interviews on YouTube. From the very beginning, he closely followed Yuri Dud. It always seemed to me that his videos were bright not only in content, but also in a linguistic sense.

If with young rappers Dud actively swears and uses slang, then with intelligent and older people he speaks quite correct Russian. And I really like to observe the diversity of the language of Yuri and his interlocutors.

I also like to watch interviews with Irina Shikhman and Elizaveta Osetinskaya. I think they are very curious, including from the point of view of the modern Russian language.

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