Internet as Russian dialect enabler
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"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).
Such increases in the number of dialect words have occurred even though the Internet has played an increasing role in Russian life over the last two decade, and Levan suggests that it is time to acknowledge this by preparing an updated version of the 2005 book in order to track the development of city-based urban dialects in Russia.
Levan is far from alone among Russian scholars who insist that Russian as spoken in Russia and elsewhere is one of the most diverse languages in the world – even though the Kremlin continues to speak as if Russian were a unified language and Moscow its definer (journal.tinkoff.ru/list/dialect-russia/).
Such fissiparousness in how Russian is spoken is even more pronounced among Russian speakers in other countries, and scholars there are now pushing for recognition that there are hyphenated Russian languages in many of them and the establishment of national institutes of the Russian language rather than having speakers continue to follow Moscow rules.
(For a discussion of that broader trend, one that affects people living in all former empires, see the remarks of Tallinn philologist Roman Essen, reposted here.)
In the PRC, still a communist country, the internet is both an enabler and a destroyer of topolects. As deployed and controlled by the CCP, it is ruthlessly utilized to root out all forms of language other than Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM). As wielded by clever netizens, the internet allows them to sneak bits and pieces of their topolects into online discourse.
Selected readings
- "'Little Russian'" (3/17/22)
- "Speaking Slavic and Turkic across Eurasia" (8/3/16)
- "Ukrainian at the edge" (10/30/22)
- "The Complexities of Eastern Slavic" (11/1/22)
- "Ukrainian is not Russian" (7/26/21)
- "Rusyn" (3/22/22)
- "From Rusyn / Ruthenian and Ukrainian, and on to Russian" (3/25/22)
- "Two notes on Three Sisters" (5/29/10)
- "Regional accents in Russian" (5/29/10)
- "Russian spies' accents puzzles" (7/8/10)
- "Russian Loans in Northeast and Northwest Mandarin: The Power of Script to Influence Pronunciation" (1/23/11)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
Viseguy said,
June 26, 2024 @ 7:15 pm
Not to be pedantic, but the headline is misleading. While the internet may not be "killing off dialects", it's not at all clear from the text of the article that it's actually "increasing their diversity" — i.e., the observed increase in diversity may be happening despite the internet, not because of it, or may be due to causes including the internet or having nothing to do with the internet. Just saying.
Cervantes said,
June 27, 2024 @ 6:57 am
Agree with Vise, it would be very hard to explain how the Internet could be increasing localized diversity of language, because the Internet has no locality. One of its most notable effects is to make distance disappear. Unless Russians spend most of their screen time on Facebook pages (or the equivalent) for local residents, which seems implausible, the effect would have to be the opposite.
Cervantes said,
June 27, 2024 @ 7:07 am
Since you don't have an edit function, let me expand on that a bit. The Internet certainly does facilitate creation of linguistic diversity, but around communities of identity or activity other than location. Sure, I can't figure out what the kids are saying in the chat room, but they're scattered all over, they aren't all in the same city.
Andrew Usher said,
June 27, 2024 @ 7:55 am
All right; I don't think local dialect diversity is actually increasing anywhere (except where political reasons are involved), though the internet among other things may make it more visible. The sort of linguistic diversity you mention isn't normally called dialect formation, as it's either just slang, or is confined to one subject area, the speakers' language remaining normal when speaking of anything else.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo dot com
Jarek Weckwerth said,
June 27, 2024 @ 12:19 pm
The Internet is not increasing dialect diversity; it is just making it much easier to study it. In other words, we just didn't realize in the olden days (by which I mean even 2010) how much diversity there was. There are three main reasons: (1) Less was written down. (2) What was written down was more formal and less dialectal. (3) It was all much harder to study because what was written down largely used media that were much less accessible, e.g. paper (or even email). Today, we have orders of magnitude more material, and in particular, we have close-to-vernacular language recorded on social media where the register is much more informal and much closer to spoken that it ever was before in written language; and all of that is orders of magnitude easier to study. Also, today, it is finally becoming feasible to study actual spoken language in this way, e.g. on YouTube, due to progress in ASR.
So yes, the title is misleading, and so is much of the quoted material.