THE SLAVONIC LANGUAGES IN THE POST-MODERN ERA

Dr John A Dunn (17 January 2000)

What I am intending to do this afternoon is to build on some of the observations that I have made about Russian at previous seminars in this series as well on the comments that I made about Polish at the Donald Pirie Conference last year to see whether some general conclusions are possible about what is happening to languages in the post-modern era. Though the title of the seminar refers somewhat grandiloquently to the Slavonic languages, the paper will concentrate on Polish and Russian, though I hope at the end to spend a few minutes seeing whether the conclusions might be applied to some of the other Slavonic languages. Since it is implicit in the title of the paper that the phenomena I am describing have fairly wide, if not universal application, I shall also make reference from time to time to languages which are not Slavonic.

The inspiration for the ideas that I am inflicting on you today was a paper given at the XII International Congress of Slavists by Peter Hill, an Australian Slavist based in Germany. Hill's thesis was essentially that the formation of standard languages was one the aspects of modernisation. In informal discussion afterwards the question naturally arose as to what would characterise the development of languages in the post-modern era, and a logical inference might be that if the formation of standard languages is connected with modernisation, then the post-modern era should be characterised by the formation of post-standard languages. What I want to suggest to you is that we are indeed witnessing the appearance of post-standard languages and that this development is associated with four processes which are to be found taking place to a greater or lesser extent in most of the principal languages of Europe.

The first of these processes I would term globalisation, since it is a process that, however marginally (and it isn't always marginal), undermines the boundaries between languages. Incidentally, anyone who is inclined to doubt the concept of breaking down the boundaries between languages is invited to contemplate the term 'franglais'. As this term suggests, the most visible aspect of this process, both for Slavonic and for other European languages is the influx of anglicisms, and many studies that have appeared in recent years have tended to concentrate solely on this aspect. In my view, however, this approach is too narrow, and I would like to suggest several reasons why it makes more sense to examine anglicisation as part of a wider phenomenon.

The first reason for preferring the term globalisation is that this is a process which is affecting almost all European languages to a greater or a lesser extent, including, it must be emphasised, English. Here I think the process has two different dimensions: the first is the increasing fluidity of the boundaries between the different varieties of English, as, for example, forms originating elsewhere, mostly in American English, but also in Antipodean or Irish varieties of English, infiltrate the language of the United Kingdom. The second dimension is the presence of loan-words and calques in English itself. Some of these derive from Britain's membership of the European Union: these include the adjective communautaire, as in the phrase acquis communautaire, which appears to have no English equivalent, and the calque value added tax (based on French taxe ¹ valeur ajoutée). Other aspects of internationalisation are, however, also reflected in this process: those who watch television transmissions of Champions League football matches will have noticed that the caption used when a player is substituted reads 'Player out/Player in', instead of the natural 'player off/player on'; this strange usage is presumably derived from Italian verbs used in this context, i.e.uscire/entrare ['to go out/come in]' or possibly from the equivalent German verbs auswechseln/einwechseln.

The second point is that English is not the only source of new terms and new vocabulary, even if according to one calculation anglicisms make up around 90% of words borrowed recently into Russian. Both Polish and Russian have had a small but significant stream of orientalisms entering the language, many of which are internationalisms; these include such words ajatollah/aqtolla and mod'axed, as well as the names of various forms of martial arts. Slightly less international are Russian daczybao and the older hunwejbin/xunvejbin, though to complicate things, the Polish is probably borrowed from the Russian, rather directly from the Chinese. There are some loan-words and claques which originate in European languages other English: Russian has l[straciq (Czech lustracie), putana (Italian puttana), zapret na professi[ (German Berufsverbot); Polish has ultras, apparently derived from the language of Spanish football hooligans and the business abbreviation S.A., which is borrowed from French, where it stands for société anonyme. In addition the term stra¿ miejska is probably influenced by Italian vigili urbani.

The third aspect of globalisation is that the process of borrowing is particularly important is certain areas. These would include in the case of Polish science and technology, and especially in recent years computer terminology, capitalist economics, sport, certain forms of popular culture, notably pop and rock music and certain aspects of mass consumption, above all fast food. For Russian, where the isolation from the West was longer and more profound, the categories include the above, but also parliamentary and multi-party politics and sex and violence. What seems to be happening in some of these areas is not so much borrowing from English as the creation of a series of international jargons, for example an international computer language, an international language of capitalist economics or of rock and roll, even an international language of hamburgers. It is true that these international jargons are made up for the most part of English elements, but it may be case that those who are not native speakers of English sometimes underestimate the extent to which computer jargon or fast food terminology, for example, sounds strange even in English.

A further aspect of linguistic globalisation is the manner in which foreign elements, usually English, are taken into a language and then used to form pseudo-exoticisms, words that have the appearance of being borrowed from English, but which are, in fact, coined in the language concerned. Russian has quite a number of these: examples include art-biznes (the buying and selling of works of art), d'erman dog (to judge from the illustration on the menu of the Doutor coffee house in Moscow, this is a frankfurter sausage in a roll and not, as the unwary English-speaker might assume, a slice of fried dachshund), slajs-bar (a place where pizza is sold in slices), f`js-kontrol; (entry policy at a night-club etc.), wejping, wou-m`n, wou-vumen (presenter of a light entertainment programme), wop-tur, wop-turistka, wop-turizm (terms referring to a combination of shopping and tourism), wef-mejker (a person chiefly responsible for an individual item on a television programme).

It is unlikely that the word d'erman dog could be successfully imported into English, but it may be felt that some of these pseudo-anglicisms do, in fact, fill gaps in the English language. This may be why the publication Ne spat;@ prints the word face control in Latin characters, as if it were a genuine English word. One or two of these pseudo-anglicisms may have entered English: the Moscow pizzeria which provided the example of slajs-bar proclaims its services bilingually, and indeed the English-language version uses the hitherto unknown term slice bar. Moreover, according to Kostomarov the term n;[ rawen first appeared in Russian in this pseudo-exotic form and was only subsequently 'translated' into novye russkie, in which case the English New Russian is a direct borrowing, rather than a calque.

In Polish a number of examples can be found among names of companies and products: among the firms advertising in the Cracow supplement to Gazeta wyborcza on 2 September 1998 are Interhome and Hitt-Dog [sic], while there is a prominent financial institution which uses the name BIG-Bank, BIG having originally been an acronym. There are also some hamburger names and the technical term siding. This type of pseudo-exoticism is not confined to the Slavonic languages: the German for a mobile phone is das Handy, complete with pseudo-English pronunciation, while at the end of the Italian football season they have play-offs, but also something called a play-out.

One extension of this phenomenon is the pun based on English materials, which however, only really works in the language concerned. One of firms which advertises the product siding in Gazeta wyborcza uses the slogan 'West siding story'; the Russian comedian Igor' Ugol'nikov once attempted a pun on the word fax and a not quite homophonic English verb. The other day I discovered a programme about food on Italian television called 'Eat parade'.

Sometimes it seems that similarities in different languages arise because each language reached the same conclusion independently. The Russian acronym BOM" has an exact equivalent in French, les SDF, but all the evidence suggests that the two terms originated independently in the respective police bureaucracies. Similarly, an Italian term for military bullying is il nonnismo, which can be translated into Russian literally as dedov]ina. Sometimes it is impossible to be certain: twice in seminars I have argued that the name of Boris Fedorov's political party Vpered Rossiq@ is copied from Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, only to encounter serious objections during discussion. I suspect the truth will never be known.

Linguistic globalisation is related to the wider phenomenon of cultural globalisation, though the ways in which the latter is reflected by the former can be quite varied. it is interesting here to look at the phenomenon of political correctness. The history of linguistic political correctness is complicated and fascinating, though not yet, as far as I know, fully explored: while there may be antecedents, it seems most probable that it originated with the French revolutionaries and was revived by the Bolsheviks. Then in one variant it was adopted by the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, giving such wonderful examples as the Polish phrase to denote the Stalin period okres blêdów i wypaczeñ, while in another it eventually found its way to the United States at the end of the 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s. Now, as the phenomenon works its way into various European languages, the position of languages such as Polish and Russian is rather complicated, since it is here that the circle is, so to speak, completed. In Russian most post-Soviet political correctness at a linguistic level relates to inter-ethnic relations and concerns such matters as the appropriate orthography of certain non-Russian place names, for example Tallin(n); it is uncertain whether such instances continue Communist-era practices or reflect global tendencies. There is, however, one example which is unambiguously derived from the Western concept of political correctness, and that is the use of the word gej as a non-pejorative word for homosexual. A good example of the new type of linguistic political correctness in Polish is the use of inaczej, corresponding to English 'differently', as in the phrase sprawny inaczej, used instead of niepe³nosprawny (cf. English 'differently abled').

Sometimes cultural globalisation can have the paradoxical effect of creating linguistic diversity. A good example of this is the genre of the television advertisement and the question of how you address the audience. in languages such as English, where there is only one second person pronoun, there is clearly no problem, but in many other European languages a decision has to be made as to whether to use the polite or the familiar form. Very preliminary observations indicate that German, French and Russian tend to use the polite form, albeit with variations, while Italian and Polish use the familiar form. In the case of Polish the reason is almost certainly linguistic: it is impossible to use the polite form of address without specifying the gender and number of the addressee, which is inconvenient in a communication intended to be universal in its scope. This choice may, however, have some interesting consequences: one polish scholar has linked the use of the familiar form in television advertisements to the use of the same form in addresses from the pulpit.

The second process leading to the creation of post-standard languages is regionalisation. This is particularly visible in various West European countries: one of the less obvious consequences of the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland was the granting of some form of official status to Ulster Scots, this being a quid pro quo to the Unionists in return for granting a similar status to Irish. English, though, because of its wide geographical spread, has always been prone to regionalisation; indeed in many respects English is the archetypal post-standard language. Elsewhere perhaps the best known example of this process is the improved status of Catalan in Spain since the death of General Franco, though Catalan is not the only regional language of Spain to have improved its position: there is now, for example, broadcasting in Galician. In France the long-standing policy of ignoring all languages except standard French is now being relaxed, and there is increased recognition for regional languages such as Occitan, Alsatian and Corsican. In Germany it is now possible to come across references to the bayerische Sprache, while in a sense the whole concept of post-standard languages is summed up by an Austrian television comedy in which all the dialogue is in Austrian and most of the captions are in English of a sort.

It might be thought that Polish would be relatively unaffected by linguistic regionalisation: Poland is not an ethnically diverse country in the way that Spain might be so described; nor is Polish a language with strong regional variations or divided between several nations as is the case with English and German. And yet, without going into protracted and ultimately sterile debates about what is a language and what is a dialect, it is possible to identify at least two regional varieties which have tended in recent years to gain in status. These are Kashubian and Silesian, though there are significant differences in the ways in which these two varieties function.

Kashubian is used by a relatively small number of people and mostly in rural areas; it owes its status to three main factors. The first is the fact that Kashubian differs from standard Polish to a much greater extent than other regional varieties used in Poland, coupled with the philological interest which these differences present. The second is the relatively long literary tradition which can be claimed for Kashubian; in the view of some observers this goes back to the sixteenth century. Finally there are the attempts which have been made, especially in recent years, to produce a standardised orthography and grammar. All this means that while many Polish scholars still consider Kashubian to be a dialect of Polish, it is possible to find claims being made for the existence of a Kashubian literary language.

Silesian differs from standard Polish rather less, at least in terms of phonology and grammar, but differs from other regional varieties in that it is widely used by the urban population of at least part of Silesia. Indeed, one account describes for the Katowice area a situation akin to diglossia, in which Silesian is used in informal circumstances by virtually sections of the population, including students and teachers. Here there seems to be a direct link between linguistic and socio-political regionalisation, in that the attempts to raise the status of the Silesian language or dialect are apparently directly connected to a desire to assert a distinct regional identity for Silesia.

For Russian regionalisation is not really an issue at all, and this serves as a good illustration of the point that not all the processes I am discussing will necessary be present in all languages. The question was essentially pre-empted by the decision of the Bolsheviks to recognise and to incorporate into their administrative structures the separate linguistic status of Belarusian and Ukrainian, while with one possible exception the dialects of Russian differ little from the standard language and have not enjoyed any prestige or status. There are, however, some curiosities: one is the increased attention paid to the regional features present in the speech of certain prominent politicians, notably Gorbachev and El'tsin; more interesting perhaps is one of the unintended consequences of the recognition of Belarusian and Ukrainian, namely the appearance of mixed forms of language, known respectively as trasqnka and sur'ik. These have no official status, but their existence is a complicating factor in the linguistic development of Belarus and Ukraine ['Lukashenko']. The one possible exception referred to earlier is the dialect of the Don Cossacks, which is historically a russified form of Ukrainian: this did have a certain status as one of the attributes of Don Cossackry and has gained a certain amount of literary recognition through the works of Sholokhov, especially Tixij don, so that with the post-Soviet revival of the Cossacks, one might expect it to come into public view in some way or other, but I haven't so far managed to come across any convincing evidence for this happening. Outside Polish and Russian it is perhaps worth mentioning the attempts to give the status of a literary language to Rusyn, a form of East Slavonic used in parts of Ukraine, Slovakia and former Yugoslavia.

The problem with the third process is to find a name which does not carry evaluative connotations. What we are concerned with here is the disappearance of constraints against the use of certain types of very informal language, slang of various types and even obscenities, though these last still tend to be replaced with more or less transparent euphemisms. In Western Europe this is a process which has happened gradually over a period of 30-40 years; for languages such as Polish and Russian, obliged to function in a culture where the 60s never happened, the changes took place rather suddenly, beginning in effect at the end of the 1980s.

I spoke at some length about this phenomenon in relation to Russian at the seminar I gave last year, and I don't really want to go over the same ground again, but there are one or two points worth making. The first is that the process seems to be essentially the same for Polish and Russian, in that it is possible to identify three different levels of language that are gaining in acceptability: these are (i) forms that were acceptable only in the most informal situations, usually only in spoken language (a category which includes not only vocabulary, but also syntax and, at least potentially, morphology); (ii) forms originating in the language of criminals (a category which may be more sharply defined for Russian than for Polish) and (iii) obscenities and their associated euphemisms.

The second point is that I read and listen to a lot more Russian than I do Polish, but it is certainly my impression that this process has gone further in Polish than it has in Russian, and I would like to suggest some reasons why this might be the case. The first is that in this area, if nowhere else, communist language policy probably tended to reinforce traditional Polish principles of linguistic etiquette, with its preferences for the formal and the dignified and the cult of Polszczyzna piêkna i poprawna. The second is that Soviet penal policy, especially in the Stalin period, but also to some extent during the Brezhnev years, created the situation where large numbers of people, above all members of the intelligentsia, who would never normally have had the opportunity to become familiar with the language of criminals were placed in the sort of environment where precisely this sort of the language was the normal form of communication. and it is presumably this circumstance that lead to criminal slang forming the basis of other forms of slang, notably that of young people. Finally, the perceived criminalisation, or semi-criminalisation of other areas of Russian life, notably politics, in the period after 1991 means that the language of criminals has been seen as appropriate for contexts where under the former dispensation it would have been unthinkable.

Apart from metrically unsound translations of off-colour limericks, there are two elements connected with globalisation which further the spread of previously unacceptable language. The first is that Polish and Russian commercial television channels now show a large number of American films and television dramas, many of which can be described as linguistically uninhibited. Where, as often happens, the translation is by a single voice-over rather than by proper dubbing, enough of the English-language sound-track remains to enable any linguistically well-informed Pole or Russian to capture the vocabulary used even where the translation fails to reproduce the full expressiveness of the original.

The second is the Internet, where both for e-mail and the World-Wide-Web a convention seems to have been widely, if not universally adopted that this is an environment which does not require any formality of language. Some people don't even use capital letters, but than capital letters are a relatively recent invention, and the Georgians have managed quite happily without them for 1700 years.

It is also difficult to find an appropriate name for the final process, though one possibility is to coin something from the Russian term steb. This is used here to refer to various forms of language game: for example, puns and other forms of word-play, allusion and use of catch-phrases, as well as various stylistic games. As I have suggested before, the parliamentary sketch column, which appears in most serious British newspapers, epitomises this process as it applies to English. When it comes to this process languages such as Polish and Russian have here an extra resource to play with, namely the political language of the Communist era. Since I also spoke at some length about this process last year and since there are few things more tedious than to have to listen to explanations of obscure puns and allusions, perhaps I can illustrate it minimalistically by reference to one newspaper headline which appeared in the newspaper Moskovskij komsomolec over a list of candidates to the Duma during the 1993 elections:

KTO BYL NIHEM _ TOT STANET XU

This contains an allusion to one of the sacred texts of the communist past, L'Internationale , as well a second allusion to one of a post-communist catch-phrase (kto est; xu, associated with Gorbachev) and also a pun with obscene connotations. What more could one wish for?

Before leaving this topic, though, there is one oddity to mention. If I am looking for examples from Polish to illustrate either the third or the fourth processes, one of the main sources I turn to is the newspaper Nie, edited by the one and only Jerzy Urban. There is an obvious irony in the fact that these processes, which are in may ways the very embodiment of post-communist linguistic practices, are most fully reflected in a publication edited a man who was previously one of the most vigorous and forthright official spokesmen for the former political dispensation. It would seem that in Nie formally taboo language and steb are being used as a sign of rebellion, and would interpret this as indicating that these process are still less generally acceptable in Polish than they are in some other languages.

It has throughout been explicit that the four processes described here would work differently and to different extents in different languages, and it equally probable that the results will not be the same in all languages. But what are these results? Fears have already been expressed that Polish might cease to exist as a language, and not much less apocalyptic predictions have been made for Russian. Yet, if you look at things a bit more dispassionately, there does not seem to be any real danger of Polish or Russian or even English disappearing as a clearly recognisable entity. What is involved in the emergence of post-standard languages is the abandonment of many traditional notions of what constitutes the linguistic norm. This essentially means a greater linguistic inclusiveness, which can certainly from one point of view be described as flooding with foreign elements and vulgarisation, but which can also be seen more positively as the opening up of opportunities to make maximum use of all available linguistic resources. You may, of course, want to call this linguistic anarchy, and in one sense it is, in that it will be difficult for any particular body or individual to claim proprietorial rights over the question of what is considered correct Polish or correct Russian. I prefer, however, to describe it in different terms: as the replacement of a single norm, obligatory for all users and all forms of public discourse, with a whole series of micro-norms which are contextually determined. This allows for a heavily anglicised speech used by young business people and for the jargon-ridden speech of soldiers or followers of rock music; it also allows for the use of Silesian or Kashubian to assert regional identity and solidarity. At the same time it recognises that what is appropriate in an army barracks or on a Silesian tram would not be fitting in a dissertation on changes in Polish grammar in the second half of the twentieth century. This is beyond doubt a language situation which places much heavier demands on the user, whether native-speaker or learner, and certainly makes post-standard languages much more 'difficult'. It is a situation which presents both opportunities and dangers, of which latter the most significant is, as far as the languages we are talking about, is not so much the disappearance of languages as linguistic atomisation: it will become increasingly difficult for even the best-read and best-informed users of a language to have a command of all the resources available and all the different micro-norms applicable in different circumstances. We are already seeing signs of this in the complaint made to me more than once by Russians that they need a dictionary to read the newspaper Moskovskij komsomolec, a complaint which rather misses the point, since the words which cause problems are precisely the sort not to be contained in most dictionaries.

I said I would conclude by saying a few words about the applicability of the ideas that I have putting forward to other Slavonic languages. On the face of it would seem that languages which combine a strong purist tradition with a diglossia-like language situation, such as Czech and perhaps Slovene would be particular prone to undergo at least three of the four processes described today, and although we may not get very far with Slovene today, I would be interested to hear what observations our Czechs have to say.

Elsewhere it is possible to come across cases where languages are threatened or even cease to exist. A particularly curious examples is Serbo-Croat, which in some ways exemplifies the whole cycle of the creation and loss of standard languages, in that it is probably the only language to have a fixed starting point, in the Vienna agreement of 1850, and a fixed finishing point, with the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. If Serbo-Croat is splitting into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, Moldovan, briefly in the eyes of some a Slavonic language in the 1940s, seems to be merging or remerging with Romanian, which is preferred by many as the name for the state language of Moldova. Finally, fears have been expressed for the future of standard Belarusian, caught between the globalising force of Russian and the regionalising force of dialects.

21 March 2000