What language will we speak tomorrow

The Russian language has changed. Dozens of monographs have been written on this topic, but almost no one has looked into them. The beginning of the disappearance of a language is sometimes spoken of on emotions, without referring to scientific data. This is done mainly by people who have already formed as individuals, with their own ideas about the world. They react more negatively to changes — they need stability, including language.

Yes, we litter speech with stupid words, local accents, anglicisms and jargon, but we do this to add more meaning to the language game. This does not mean that we spoil it. People love to play games. We do not condemn the writers who freely handled the language and introduced such words as “epoch” (thanks to Karamzin), “thermometer” (Lomonosov), “shuffle” (Saltykov-Shchedrin) and “mediocrity” (Severyanin). All this has nothing to do with language degradation.

“Language is a slow, clumsy system that maintains its balance even under the influence of stronger influences,” says Anna Potsar. — Statements in social networks are, as a rule, spontaneous speech, in many respects close to oral speech. It is not even water that cannot be entered twice. This is the air that we breathe: we do not undertake to look for the air that we exhaled five minutes ago.

Changes in language prove that the language is in circulation and remains alive. But word formation is one thing, foreign borrowings are another.

Speak Russian! OK!

In Russian, foreign borrowings appeared hand in hand with the first foreign contacts. Firstly, to designate phenomena and things that had not previously been in the life of a Russian person — “sheepskin coat”, “cocoa”, “penguin”. Secondly, foreign terms helped to reduce the number of words (summit — a summit meeting, deadline — the deadline for submitting work). We do not even suspect how many foreign terms we use in everyday life. These «aliens» are already inseparable from our culture.

It must be understood that in lexicology, a word is considered to be native Russian if it is formed even from a borrowed root, but only with the help of Russian-language word-formation parts. For example, “highway” is quite a Russian word, by definition, the word “memasik” can also be recognized as the same.

In most discussions about the degradation of the language, we are not talking about deep academic scientific controversy. It happens that less common words are extracted from private correspondence and discussed so actively that they are smuggled into our everyday colloquial speech. A similar mechanism worked in the case of criminal jargon, which is already perceived as a completely acceptable means of expression for the media. For example, «put on the counter» or «get on the money.»

Foreign borrowings are a natural mechanism for the evolution of a language in a world where conditional boundaries are expanding every day. New words are organically built into the system and do not affect the internal rules of grammar and punctuation, which determine the linguistic identity. True, errors and typos have ceased to be a rarity in our time.

Is the Internet evil?

We feel like we used to be smarter. But in fact, typos, clumsy wording and distortion of constructions simply did not go beyond private communications. All this remained at home, in the family, in a professional team. But then the internet came along.

Everyone is gathered here: foreigners, people with professional slang, regional features and the language of small groups. We suspected that professional jargon existed, but we didn’t see it in such quantity. “Ban” (English “block”), “mimimi” (Chinese, the sound of meowing), “like” (English “like”) are just foreign words that we have not used before.

Now all this is dumped into one big box, from which we, voluntarily or involuntarily, choose cubes and build our own language image. British philologist David Crystal even invented a new profession for learning a language on the Internet — interlinguist. But, as he himself wrote in one of the scientific works, «the Internet simply puts a mirror in front of us.»

“The Internet has partly made the private public, putting on public display all the imperfections of unprofessional speech and writing,” Anna Potsar continues. “Today, anyone can write a text, bypassing editorial and proofreading changes, and everyone will see his message. The internet just showed us our shortcomings.”

It turns out that we always wrote illiterately. But grammar rules don’t change because most people don’t know how to use them correctly. Moreover, these rules do not apply to visual images, which can be used to replace words.

Rock art of the XNUMXst century

Fashion and time are changing us: life is accelerating, and we no longer have the opportunity to explain to the interlocutor the feelings that have gripped us for a long time. As soon as humanity was offered simplification in the form of a smiley, we seized on it as a lifeline.

Smiley — scientifically «emoticon» — came into our lives with a keyboard, virtual texts and electronic messages: written communication has become faster, easier and more understandable. In 1969, Vladimir Nabokov, in one of his interviews, literally asked when emoticons would appear. After 13 years, Scott Fahlman answered his request and came up with this :-).

“Emoji simply reflect the changes in ourselves. It’s not about the language, it’s about us, says Anna Potsar. We have stopped holding back our emotions. We have become more open and more aggressive. This is a change in the communicative model, and not at all an update of the language. For example, society has ceased to believe that swear words are something egregious. This is a trend, and it can lead anywhere: both to a complete ban on profanity, and the disappearance of the veil of prohibition.

Language games and cryptography with emoticons do not affect the language in any way, as long as its speakers have reference samples in front of their eyes. In writing and speaking, there should be sections where literacy and purity of language are necessary, and then the temporary fashion can remain temporary.

«I’m responsible for the market»

But there are still negative trends. We really began to pay less attention to literacy and purity of the language. It is the responsibility of the user to select quality information. We ourselves are both scientific and literary editors. Personal blogs and online groups are recognized as new media, but regulators care about content, not literacy.

To preserve the norms of the language, a sample is needed. A mistake, read a thousand times, eats into the brain of even a very literate person. When the reader does not see an example either in a book or on TV, he takes the error for the norm. Having repeated the mistake two thousand times, he himself begins to influence the formation of the language.

It is impossible to predict what will happen to the language tomorrow. We will have to predict political, economic, cultural breakthroughs, fashion trends, population growth and many related factors. Language norms will fluctuate on the scales from «bastards» to «grammar Nazis», but military expansion will not save the situation.

If a person reads something correct from childhood, not from the point of view of content, but from the point of view of the literacy of the text, his speech level also rises. Literacy is primarily visual memory, not memorization of rules. Speech is formed not by stress dictionaries, but by the musical sound of words. It turns out that we ourselves are responsible for the literate Russian language for us and our children. What we read, how we write and speak every day is the answer to the question of what language we will speak tomorrow.