Russian Nationalists Say ‘Nyet’ to Foreign Words

LONDON â€" Nationalist Russian legislators have introduced a bill to hold back a tide of foreign words, specifically English ones, which they claim is swamping the Russian language.

A bill submitted by the minority Liberal Democratic Party would impose fines of up to $1,700 on officials, advertisers and journalists who use foreign words rather than their Russian equivalents.

Their main gripe appears to be with English words that have crept into Russian since the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to the broadcaster Russia Today.

“They specifically mention the Russian words that ended up as ‘dealer’, ’boutique’, ‘manager’, ‘single’, ‘OK’ and ‘wow’,” RT said on its Web site.

The legislators were said to have taken their inspiration from France and Poland, wich have laws to protect their national languages from foreign incursions, and from Quebec, where local officials zealously guard the Canadian province’s French-language tradition.

Given the onward march of English as the dominant world language, the efforts of the language purists may ultimately be doomed.

The tendency of languages to adopt foreign words is scarcely a modern phenomenon. Russian itself has a multitude of borrowings from languages as diverse as Mongolian and Latin.

Borrowings often reflect concepts or linguistic nuances that do not exist in the native language. English borrowed “mammoth” and “sable” from the Russians as well as the more recent “agitprop” and “gulag.”

Alina Sabitova, writing for the Russkiy Mir Foundation, which promotes Russian language and culture, acknowledged that proscriptive laws in countries such as Poland and France were rarely observed in practice.

That cast doubt on the claim of Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the Liberal Democratic Party leader, that “all major countries have purged foreign loan words from their national languages.”

Russia Today got itself in hot water on Thursday with the headline “Grammar Nazi Style” on its report of the proposed ban.

One anonymous commenter suggested those responsible should be sent to the gulags, while another declared:

“Russia needs to protect own language for a million parasite words that have infiltrated the country from the West. Russian language is a very rich language and stupid replacement of Russian words with English is bad for the cuntry and culture.”

The language debate in Russia, as elsewhere, has obvious political overtones, with purists frequently railing against American cultural hegemony and English-language imperialism. (A colleague recalls that one Communist-era Polish language activist took particular exception to the phrase “whiskey on the rocks.”)

Language watchdogs can also fall into the trap of overzealousness.

Quebec’s French language office backed down this week after it provoked a furor by warning the owner of an Italian restaurant that there were too many Italian words on his menu.

Where do you stand on the language issue Do foreign borrowings enrich languages or diminish them Is the dominance of English a plus or a minus in an increasingly interconnected world And will new laws do anything to counter the trend