Internet as Russian dialect enabler
"Internet Not Killing Off Dialects within Russian as Many Suppose but Increasing Their Diversity, Moscow Scholar Says", Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia (6/7/24)
It is widely assumed that the Internet is contributing to the homogenization of languages and killing off both dialects and local variants; but in fact, a Moscow scholar says, a new survey of Russian as spoken in the cities of that country finds that in many places, dialects are unexpectedly expanding.
Ivan Levan, a specialist at the Moscow Institute of the Russian Language at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that he and his colleagues have recently found “about 2,000” new words that vary from city to city and were not recorded in V.I. Belikov and V.P. Selegey’s 2005 work on Languages of Russian Cities (yandex.ru/company/researches/2021/local-words).
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