As you know, the head of the State Duma Committee on Culture, Yelena Yampolskaya, announced that a bill had already been prepared to tighten the norms for combating Anglicisms. She is sure that in our country the norms for the use of anglicisms in everyday life, mainly on signs and in advertising, should be tightened. According to Yampolskaya's calculations, there are 30-50% more signboards in English on the streets of Moscow than in Russian, while the citizens of the country should be surrounded by their native language and native alphabet. In the near future, the parties and factions of the State Duma will discuss this bill.
This initiative is curious in that we have already gone through this and passed it unsuccessfully, bloggers on social networks note. For example, under Stalin in 1948-1953, a similar mass political campaign "Fight against cosmopolitanism" was widely launched, which began, as now, with terminology. So, French rolls were renamed "urban", boxing hook into "side kick", football offside became "offside position" and so on... It's not about the fight for the purity of the language, after all, many countries are trying to protect their national languages from English influence, the fact is that in Russia this struggle is completely useless. It will last a year, two or five, and then everything will return to normal, as it happened after the death of Stalin. The Russian language is good because it very quickly adapts other people's words to itself, thereby enriching itself, but without losing its originality and flexibility. Well, unless Russia completely cuts itself off from Western civilization, which would be like suicide. Reorienting towards China in the linguistic sphere will not work at all, since the Russian language belongs precisely to the Indo-European group of languages.
In addition, bloggers are perplexed:
- Why are we now surrounded by the letter of the non-Russian alphabet Z?
- Yes, there are not many Anglicisms in everyday life. There are many Germanisms, Gallicisms, Turkisms... In some areas, yes. In the navy, for example. Or football, hockey, volleyball, basketball... What, again a football? Instead of "goal!" shout "gate?". The orderlies will be handed over... Forward, hav, defender, goalkeeper, offside, penalty kick, winger, playmaker, referee, linesman, half, boots... What do you call jeans? The president, the congress, the summit, the parliament, the minister... They are completely crazy...
- Well, with IT-shniks everything is clear - they are immediately krantets. It is unlikely that they, the poor fellows, will find normal means for professional communication in pure Russian. However, they could think there, in this department, how to name themselves now. After all, it was originally Ministry of Culture (that is, both words in the name are foreign languages). Yes, by the way, there are no such ministries in any civilized country, but for some reason there is culture.