On Russian in Russia

Last fall, the Russian Federation’s Ministry of the Press held a roundtable conference, “The Russian Language on the Air: Problems and Paths to their Solution.” The Council of the Russian Language and the Russian Language in Mass Media Commission met with representatives of the government and the conclusions were clear: the Russian language as spoken on broadcast media is very bad.

Minister of Education Vladimir Shadrikov informed the roundtable that a special federally funded program “The Russian Language” exists, and it helps everyone on the air to “master” the Russian language.

Shadrikov also pointed out that Russian is an important language of international communication: 285 million people consider Russian to be their native language and 180 million more study it as a foreign language. But this international aspect has a downside: the cultural context of Russian is disappearing as imported words substitute for already existing Russian words.

Anna Shatilova, a former Central Television reporter, commented on how professionalism in the media has declined. Many people coming to work for television and radio, she said, speak the language of the street, full of imported colloquialisms and slang, and excessive informality of speech. Examples of inexplicable foreign borrowings are legion: killer, messidzh, brend (“brand”), lakuna; there are well-established Russian equivalents for all these examples (nayomny ubiytsa, soobschenie, marka, probel).