ZOYA G. PROSHINA
When discussing Russian Englishes,1 I focus on the cultural diversity of Englishes in Russia, though the term in the plural can raise some doubts due to the federal state unity and strong trends toward standardization in the education system of Russia. However, standardization of English in Russia differs from similar processes in the Inner and Outer Circle countries in a greater variability of exonormative models that can be learnt and followed by users of English, which might be typical of other Expanding Circle Englishes as well. In this chapter, I also show the gradual expanding of English in Russia and the increase in its functions.
Russian English is not a term to indicate use of English in the ethnic framework only. Russia is a federal state, with 85 constituent entities (subjects) of the federation, including 22 republics, 4 autonomous okrugs (“districts”), 1 autonomous oblast (“province”), 9 krais (“territories”), 46 oblasts (“regions”), and 3 cities of federal importance. The republics, okrugs, and autonomous oblast are mainly homes for ethnic minorities, though every constituent entity has a mixed population. Over 180 ethnicities make up Russia’s population; therefore, over 180 cultures underpin languages used in the country. According to the 2010 census, the dominant language is Russian, which is in use by 99.4 % of the population, including 5.7 % of non‐Russian ethnicities who claim Russian as their native language, among them 40% of the Komi, 38% of the Udmurt, 35% of the Mordva, 29% of the Chuvashi, 25% of the Mari, and 20% of the Tatar (Federal Service of State Statistics 2010). Other languages used by 0.1 % of the population and over are listed in Table 13.1.
Table 13.1 Languages (besides Russian) used by over 0.1% of the population of the Russian Federation.
Language | Percentage | Language | Percentage |
English | 5.48 | Lezgin | 0.29 |
Tatar | 3.09 | Mordvin | 0.28 |
German | 1.50 | Mari | 0.26 |
Chechen | 0.98 | Udmurt | 0.23 |
Bashkir | 0.83 | Ingushi | 0.22 |
Ukrainian | 0.82 | Karachay Balkar | 0.22 |
Chuvash | 0.75 | Tuvinian | 0.18 |
Avar | 0.52 | Buryat | 0.16 |
French | 0.45 | Belarusian | 0.13 |
Kabardian and Balkar | 0.37 | Georgian | 0.12 |
Dargin | 0.35 | Lak | 0.11 |
Azerbaijani | 0.34 | Spanish | 0.11 |
Ossetian | 0.33 | Turkish | 0.11 |
Kazakh | 0.29 | Tajik | 0.10 |
Table 13.1 reveals both Russian and ethnic minority language bilingualism and Russian and foreign language bilingualism, the latter including English, proficiently2 spoken by 5.48% of the country’s population, German (1.5%), French (0.45%), Spanish (0.11%), and Turkish (0.11%). Asian languages that are finding more and more use and popularity in the Asian part of Russia did not surpass the overall limit of 0.1% speakers in 2010, the year of the population census. Other languages listed in the table are native to former Soviet republics (Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Belarusian, Georgian, Tajik) whose populations have rooted in Russia, and to indigenous ethnic groups residing in territories making up autonomous republics and other administrative and territorial units, as well as in multicultural cities and even villages.
Being citizens of Russia, representatives of ethnic minorities, as well as the Russian ethnic majority, name themselves Rossiyane ‘citizens of Russia’, which is translated as ‘Russians’, alluding to the broad sense of the word. The second, narrow, sense of the word ‘Russians’ is found in the ethnonym Russkiye ‘ethnic Russians’. The word Russkiye and the English name of Russia are derived from Rus, the name of a medieval state of East Slavs, while Rossiyane is a later derivative of the country’s Greek name Ros(s)ia, fixed in the sixteenth century with the establishment of Moscovia, or Grand Principality of Moscow (Kloss 2012). Therefore, when we speak about Russian English, we imply both broad and narrow meanings of the word Russian, and it might be more appropriate to use the plural Russian Englishes to encompass both. However, the singular form – Russian English – is more traditional and, therefore, is preferred in this chapter to the pluralized form.
The multicultural diversity of Russia is also based on multiconfessional characteristics. Over 60% of the population associate themselves with the Orthodox culture, 19% are Muslims, 10% are Protestants, 0.4% are Catholics, and about 9% are associated with Old Believers, Judaists, Buddhists, and Pagans (Religion in Today’s Russia 2014).
It is no wonder that the multiculturalism of Russia leads to the heterogeneity in the term Russian English. Cultural specifics are reflected first and foremost in the vocabulary. Using English as an indirect means for self‐identity, each ethnicity enlarges the English lexical stock when expressing their culture‐loaded concepts. Thus, specific culture‐bound words of Russian English include, besides proper Russian matryoshka ‘a set of nested wooden dolls’, balalaika ‘a four‐string musical instrument’, and sbiten ‘a nonalcoholic herb and honey drink’, Ukrainian pampushki ‘type of dinner roll with garlic and herbs’, vareniki ‘dumplings with fillings’, uzvar ‘a drink made of dried fruit’; Belarusian draniki ‘potato pancakes’, cymbaly ‘a hammered dulcimer’. Besides Slavic words, Russian English in the broad sense of the term also includes Buryat datsan ‘a Buddhist monastery’, Khural ‘the regional government’, khorhog ‘a cooking method in hot stones’; Yakut yhyak festival ‘a celebration of seasonal change’, ohuokhai ‘line dance’, Tuvinian khoomei ‘throat singing’ and many others. Nowadays, due to the globalism that has become a feature of various spheres of our life it is not only an issue of preserving cultural self‐identity that is urgent but also an issue of its enhancement, development, spread, and introduction to other peoples. This is done through English as the global transcultural language that has become “a secondary means of cultural identity” to many ethnicities (Kabakchi 1998: 5). Ulana Kuznetsova (2005: 23), a Russian linguist of Tuwa origin, argues that the solution to the problem of preserving and developing minor languages should not be viewed in their opposing to major world languages but in reasonable employment of international‐language means for an active inclusion of their native speakers in the life of the world community. The international language serves as the secondary means to express their cultural and lingual self‐identity, which makes English a means of developing a corpus of information and a way to conserve information about a minor ethnicity’s culture.
The attitude to the Expanding Circle Englishes is often negative among their users because the term is associated with learners’ language characterized by mistakes and restricted usage. For example, a 2013 survey of about 350 Russian students, teachers, and professionals who use English revealed that less than a quarter (24%) accept the concept of Russian English in a positive way, others believing that they speak either British or American English (or a mixture), thus substituting an English teaching model for a real‐life variety (Proshina 2014). For most Russians, the concept of Russian English is associated with pidginized, low‐level English (Proshina 2014).
However, learners’ English is only part of the continuum, or “bilingual cline” (B. Kachru 1983: 77) that makes up a variety. The continuum of Russian English is much broader than learners’ English and, to use the metalanguage of contact linguistics (Stewart 1965), consists of three zones based on the functional usage and level of speakers’ proficiency – basilectal, mesolectal, and acrolectal. Learners’ English is usually associated only with the basilectal or mesolectal zones of the continuum and should be viewed as an individual’s language closer to Selinker’s (1974) concept of interlanguage rather than a social variety characteristic of an entire speech community (Davies 1989: 447). Interlanguage formed in between the mother tongue and the target language when a learner tries to achieve a native‐speaker competence is a psycholinguistic phenomenon, as “[i]nterlanguage refers to the knowledge of the L2 in the speaker’s mind” (Cook 1999: 190), while a variety of world Englishes is of a sociolinguistic nature – it identifies a certain speech community in the largest sense. No doubt, any social phenomenon consists of a number of individual constituents, but as a whole, it is much broader and, to some degree, more abstract and generalized than any individual constituent. Therefore, Russian English as a social variety embraces the basilectal individual speech of learners, mesolectal speech of educated users who can deviate from linguistic norms for various reasons, and acrolectal speech in formal contexts of well‐controlled usage by educated Russians. Russian English as variety is generalized and typified from basilectal, mesolectal, and acrolectal individual phenomena, that is, English written and spoken by political figures and business men and women, TV and radio presenters, journalists and artistic figures, scientists and scholars, teachers, and students.
As a variety in the Expanding Circle, Russian English is exonormative; that is, it has no norms of its own which are developed within this variety. Russian English relies on exonorms that serve as models for English teaching and learning (see Proshina & Eddy 2016).
Traditionally, the Russian educational system imposed British norms on learners of English, in accord with the concept of English as a Foreign Language focused on studying the language and culture of native English speakers. Today many schools tend to rely on American English norms due to the political and economic power of the US and intensified contacts with that country and other countries that also prefer American English as a model in English‐language teaching. The country’s unified educational space prescribed by the federal educational standards is still geared towards native speakers’ English and culture, but also aims to develop linguacultural competence enabling English users to communicate about their own culture. So, even without realizing clearly that the variety based on Russian culture is not British or American English but constitutes Russian English, educationists have propagated learning Russian English, and this is observed, first and foremost, at lexical and textual levels.
Native speaker English, which is used as a model for teaching, is definitely associated with British or American Englishes. However, life corrects federal standards. With the increase in intercultural contacts with Australia and New Zealand, some Russian English users are apt to follow Australian and New Zealand models, which is evident in their accents, choices of vocabulary, word formations, and even grammatical forms. Those Russians who have been dealing with other Englishes, for example South African or Indian, which are in the process of developing their own endonorms, might follow the features of these varieties, thus increasing the variability of Russians’ own English. In a word, as an exonormative variety, Russian English adopts different normative forms, which practice testifies to its greater variability as compared with Inner Circle Englishes. This conclusion is in contrast to Jenkins’ idea of using a reduced or simplified core of phonological features in the Expanding Circle Englishes (Jenkins 2000). If we speak of a variety in the broad sense as described above, with a cline of users and a wide range of uses, we cannot but observe greater variability of phonetic realizations in the sound repertoire of an Expanding Circle English as compared with its prototypical models from the Inner Circle. Other levels of the language structure (grammar and lexis) also demonstrate greater variability of normative forms.
Though using exonorms at most structural levels of the English language, Expanding Circle countries whose systems of writing are not based on Roman letters establish their own standards of Romanization for transcribing culture‐bound words in English (compare Pinyin in China, the Revised Romanization System in Korea, and the Hepburn System in Japan). One of the major problems for Russian English standardization is the lack of a unified standard of Romanization: geographical place‐names are written one way, administrative bodies responsible for issuing international passports have another standard, driving licenses are filled out in a third way, and so on. Thus, the same name can have different Romanized forms: Enisei, Enisey, Yenisey, Yenisei, Ienisei, Ienisey, Jenisej (the name of a river). This is a real challenge for participants in intercultural communication, and it has been repeatedly pointed to by scholars and practicing translators (Kabakchi 2010; Strategium 2012; Superanskaya 2001).
Specific features of Russian English (see details in Proshina & Eddy 2016), like those of any other variety of additional or auxiliary English, result from two main factors: influences of indigenous languages and cultural impacts, or a linguacultural worldview.
The transfer of Russian language features is most evident in phonetic accent: intonation; rolled [r]; substitution of dentals or fricatives for interdental consonants [θ/ð] (e.g. than might be pronounced as dan or zan); devoicing of word‐final and middle consonants in words like bag (pronounced as bak) and newspaper [‐sp‐]; lack of consonant aspiration; fronting vowels; and confusing long and short vowels (see Zavyalova 2016). In morphology, the most typical deviations concern the verb tense and aspect systems, especially perfect and progressive forms (see Davydova 2011), nondifferentiation of the past and present subjunctive forms, nonfinite forms of the verb (using infinitives instead of gerunds and vice versa), and irregular use of articles. Syntactic features reflect the transfer of Russian syntax as engraved in Russian mentality onto English structures. Among them, the most vivid and typical features are the following: object‐fronting (This book I read last year); placing the head word of an attributive cluster at the beginning of the phrase (problem generation gap for ‘generation gap problem’); long sentences with asyndetic (without conjunctions) coordinative clauses (e.g. The research demonstrated that most of the groups’ names possess the majority of the features of a typical trademark: they are emotionally appealing, easy to remember, highly original, they create bright images and often use graphical devices, RCAE‐3: 1);3 using yes to a negative question to confirm the negation (Didn’t you know that? – Yes, I didn’t know.).
Cultural features of Russian English are most obvious in lexis (culture‐loaded words) (Kabakchi 2002) and textual pragmatics. For example, scholars including Larina (2009: 222–238), Ogiermann (2009: 193), and Visson (2005) address directness, imperativeness, masculine orientation, belittling oneself, and speaker orientation as typical features of Russian culture reflected in the language. Directness and imperativeness result in the impression (on non‐Russian English users) of rude discourse, as Russians’ English speech abounds with imperative constructions, including negative ones, such as Close the door please, and Don’t forget your umbrella, the latter (negative form) expressing prohibition rather than advice. Masculine orientation is revealed in using masculine gender pronouns for common nouns and pronouns (Everybody should hand in his paper after the bell) and the “politically incorrect” semi‐suffix –man (chairman, postman). Belittling oneself is typical of Asian cultures, and this feature in Russian English can be accounted for by the intermediate position of Russian culture that has inherited European and Asian characteristics. Belittling is manifested in downgrading compliments addressed to oneself (What a beautiful dress! – Oh, it is pretty old); in avoiding the pronoun I in various types of speech acts (It’s interesting to know… instead of I wonder…; or You can take it from me instead of I can give it to you; we with Ann instead of Ann and I). These examples are not ego oriented but reflect the collectivist type of culture typical of Russians.
It is noteworthy that these features cannot be expected in the speech of all Russian users of English. They are typical of mesolectal English and, therefore, are usually avoided in formal acrolectal discourses when speakers have a full control over their speech. These features are not standard – they just manifest developing trends of the variety used in this Expanding Circle country. Still, they are typical, productive, and systematic in the English produced by educated Russians – these three features (typicality, productivity, and systematicity) are the major criteria for a description of any variety (B. Kachru 1983: 81). And though none of the described features is uniquely Russian,4 together they characterize the formal aspect of English used by Russians. To make the picture of this variety more complete, we discuss use of English in Russia.
Regarding use of English, the main facet is the increase of its penetration into various domains of Russian life. Traditionally, English has served as a lingua franca in intercultural communication. As compared with a decade ago, today more and more people and institutions, including educational establishments, are becoming aware of the fact that English is used to communicate with not only native speakers from Great Britain and the United States but also – mostly – with speakers of various world Englishes, with their accents and specifics of discourse, lexis, and grammar. Therefore, universities tend to introduce elements of courses familiarizing their students with other Englishes and cultures via English by including this material into syllabi in English, translation and interpretation, linguaculture, and sociolinguistics.
Intercultural communication in Russian English is carried out in many domains – politics (language of diplomats and public figures), economics (business, tourism, advertisement – see Gritsenko & Laletina 2012), mass media (newspapers, journals, both in print and online editions; internet forums, blogs, social nets; radio and TV channels broadcasting in English), science and scholarship (conferences, publications), academics (English as a school discipline; programs in English; joint programs, for example, Russian‐American programs, providing students with degrees from two universities simultaneously – see Lawrick 2011), sports, leisure (popular music, tourism, movies, electronic games), and everyday life (correspondence with friends and relatives abroad).
Some of these domains are oriented toward both international and domestic applications of English – for example, in youth subcultures, such as pop or rock music, lyrics are composed by Russian authors in English and performed within the country (probably with a secret dream to become known worldwide; see Eddy 2007). Mass media are aimed at both international and Russian audiences.
Domestically, English is used in advertising, in which English slogans, brand names, and names of shops, cafes, beauty salons, etc. are associated with prestige, innovation, and modernity (Ustinova 2002, 2006) and facilitate “commodification of English” (Gritsenko 2014: 29) as a tool for achieving material well‐being.
In the new Russian reality, some English words start living their own semantic lives, widening or narrowing their meanings. For example, the word salon is used not only to name a place where you can get your hair done or a shop where fashionable and expensive clothes are sold. Russian cities have autosalons (‘autoshows’), dental salons (‘exhibitions with new equipment for dental clinics and for dental care’), fireplace salons where the meaning is ‘exhibition with new fireplaces showcased.’ Studio is used to indicate a service center or a special shop, as in Art Point Studio, Image Studio, Studio Beauty. The word hall is widely used in the names of shops, almost replacing the word store: Plasma Hall, Digital Hall, Sony Hall, Art Fashion Hall. The abbreviation VIP has changed its meaning to signify just the high quality of an advertised product: VIP Discount Center, VIP pelmeny (‘dumplings stuffed with meat’).
English has become an additional means for language play (Rivlina 2008, 2012; Yelenevskaya 2008), which is especially salient in advertising, where code‐mixing makes it possible to attract buyers’ attention and facilitates the ludic function of the language. Examples are numerous: the name of a shop, E¨‐style, which combines the disputed Russian letter E¨ with diacritical marks that are often lost in writing but are very significant for the meaning of the word, sounds like ‘Your style’ and has an inviting reference to the customer’s good taste. The Englishized name Hall idey (Холлидей) sounds like ‘holiday’, and the store sells all sorts of products for creative work in leisure time. At the same time, Russians can understand the name as ‘Hall of ideas,’ as the last word is the Romanized Russian genitive plural of the word ‘idea’. Thus, the code‐mixing is a driving force for brain work and draws customers to the store.
A comparatively new function of Russian English is found in fiction, known as contact literature (B. Kachru 1986), translingual literature (Kellman 2003; Hansen 2012), or world literatures in English (Y. Kachru & Smith 2008). Until recently, Russians knew very few bilingual authors of Russian origin who created literary works in English. Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was the most famous such novelist. However, it was difficult to say which language in his linguistic repertoire was dominant: he was trilingual from early childhood and used to say, “My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French” (Nabokov 1964). Unlike Nabokov, today’s authors are late bilinguals – they began writing English as emigrants from Russia. These (mostly post‐perestroika) authors of Russian origin include Anya Ulinich, Lara Vapnyar, Olga Grushin, Maxim D. Shrayer, Mark Budman, Sana Krasikov, Boris Fishman, Michael Idov, Gary Shteyngart, Josef Brodsky, Vasily Aksyonov, Irina Reyn, Ellen Litman, David Bezmozgis, Ksenia Melnik, and Tanya D. Davis. Their works of fiction are published in the countries where the new immigrants settled, but they are based on Russian culture and interspersed with motifs of classical Russian literature (Butenina 2016). As Ryan (2013) remarks, “[t]he cross‐fertilization of English with Russian creates linguistic palimpsests, where Russian underlies and affects the English of the texts”(para. 23). Reflecting Russian mentality and verbalizing Russian reality, works of these functionally bilingual authors serve as a linguacultural instrument of reaching out and, though sometimes these authors are named American or American‐Russian (or like David Bezmozgis, Canadian‐Russian), their novels and stories reveal the Russian mindset and represent Russian English as a variety.
The impact of English in Russia is evident both in function and form. Formal traces are revealed in modified features of English in Russia (Russification of English) and in a great number of changes in the Russian language proper, as well as in minority languages of the Russian Federation. The research on words borrowed from English into Russian is plentiful, addressing the huge number of English loans that flood the Russian language. A lot of works are written in the framework of ecolinguistics (Kostomarov 1999), as the English loanwords are viewed as a threat to the purity of the native language (cf. the title of the book by established Russian scholar Maxim Krongauz (2009) The Russian Language on the Brink of a Nervous Breakdown). The foci of research are on the history of English‐Russian contacts (Aristova 1978; Belyayeva 1973, 1984), loanword adaptation into Russian, impact on Russian syntax and word‐building, functions of loans, domains of use, and the role of borrowed concepts in Russian culture.
Researchers emphasize the increase in the rate of English loans at the turn of the century (the post‐perestroika period). English loans make up the majority of all words borrowed from various languages. One of the first attempts to compile a dictionary of English loanwords in Russian is based on 5,000 words (Semyonova 2003), though the dictionary contains only 1,500 lexemes, as it excludes the following highly popular types of words: proper names (trademarks, brands) such as viskas (generically ‘cat food’ from the brand name Whiskers), and drimworks (Dreamworks); common names formed from proper names – shropshiry ‘a breed of sheep’ and darvinism (Darwinism); loan translations, or calques – myshka ‘computer mouse’) and vsemirnaya pautina ‘worldwide web’; words of doubtful etymology (either from German, French, or English) – blok ‘block’, blokada ‘blockade’; and English loans not assimilated yet – survaiyer ‘surveyor’ and flering ‘flaring’ (Semyonova 2007). A newer complete dictionary of Anglicisms in Russian compiled by Anatoly Dyakov (2014–2015) and published online about a decade later comprises 15,000 words.
Loanword adaptation takes place at all levels of language structure. At the phonographic level, an increase in the number of transplanted words, that is, words in their original Romanized form rather than transcribed or transliterated into Cyrillic, is noted (Apetian 2011). This trend intensifies code‐mixing phenomena that were mentioned earlier in this chapter. For example, one of the most popular Russian newspapers, Komsomolskaya Pravda, often employs transplanting as a special device for headlines:
Amerikanskiy dress‐code – chto nosit' na rabote
‘American dress‐code – what to wear at the workplace’
When entering the Russian language, many loanwords are employed with Russian affixes: praisovyi (Adj) < ‘price’, apgreidirovat' < ‘to upgrade’; perebutovatsia < ‘to boot up’. Russian affixes are also added to transplanted stems: life‐style'овый (Adj); call‐центр ‘call‐center’. It is not infrequent for loans to undergo semantic changes (Maximova 2002; Yelenevskaya 2008):
English patterns of word formation are also borrowed. Quite a new phenomenon, which is gradually spreading in various domains of use, is the N+N pattern, which substitutes for the earlier and more productive Adj+N (Aitmukhametova 2000). Nowadays Russian abounds in words like ofis‐menedzher < ‘office‐manager’ instead of ofisnyi menedzher; internet‐proekt < ‘internet‐project’, hit‐parad < ‘hit‐parade’, and kesh‐flou < ‘cash flow’. New collocations appear: tuning garderoba /mebeli ‘wardrobe/furniture tuning’, similar to ‘car tuning’; konvertiruyemyi diplom ‘converted diploma’, that is, one recognized by other countries. Under the influence of English, Russians use the verb delat' ‘to do’ in a much wider way now, calquing English collocations: delat' pablisiti ‘to do publicity’ and delat' shoping ‘to do shopping’.
Today's English loans are typically found in special domains: business and economics, politics, law, information technology, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, physics, chemistry, and biology. Over time, some of these words lose their narrow meanings and join the general vocabulary, not infrequently with the help of mass media. The third layer of loanwords (apart from special and general vocabulary) arises in specific subculture vocabulary, forming the basis for slang and argot typical of youth subgroups: musical (saundtrek ‘soundtrack’, didzhei ‘DJ’, singl ‘single’), new types of sport (rafting, roller, streetets ‘street freeride biking’, haf‐paip ‘half‐pipe’). To make itself more estranged from the mainstream community, youth slang abounds in various derivatives from English that denote ordinary actions, qualities, and objects (Nazarova 2008): kissatsia < ‘to kiss’; iskeipnuvshiy < ‘escaped’; pisyuk < ‘PC’.
Similar processes are characteristic of Russia's minority languages. Substantial research has been done into English loans in Tatar, where 2,245 English loans have been fixed (Abdullin 2007), and the Ingush language (Pugoyeva 2011). Most of the loans are technical terms that enlarge the terminological corpus of minority languages. Until the 1990s, most English words were borrowed into minority languages via Russian; nowadays they are loaned directly from English, which testifies to the increased English‐ethnic bilingualism (or even trilingualism, in ethnic‐Russian‐English) of speech communities in the Russian Federation (Russian English in the broad sense of the term).
While speaking of Englishization of the Russian language, we should also bear in mind the role of English as an intercultural language in spreading concepts and words of other languages, making them international. Thus, in Russia as in many other countries, we can observe keen interest in and enthusiasm for Asian cultures – Chinese and Japanese cuisines, martial arts, feng shui, and Chinese medicine. Under the influence of English, many words from these cultures have been borrowed in their Englishized forms, as if they were English. This results in breaking long‐standing traditions of direct Sino‐Russian or Japanese‐Russian translations and then imposing Englishized forms. For example, experts in Japanese language and culture are active in opposing the form суши (sushi) written in Cyrillic instead of суси (susi) as is prescribed by the Japanese‐Russian system of transliteration. Yet all Russian cities have a great number of sushi‐bars and sushi‐kafe ‘sushi cafes’. Karate fighters who study theoretical issues on combat and techniques with the help of English books pronounce Japanese loans like English (waza rather than [wadza], which is required by the Japanese‐Russian transcription system). Journalists who write about China spell Chinese loans in mistaken ways as they take the Chinese Pinyin for usual English Roman letters, thus also breaking with traditional transliteration. This brings up a great number of confusing doubles, not always easily recognized as referring to the same item or concept – for example, the correct Russian form of the Chinese martial arts pronounced as [tai‐tzi] < ‘tai ji’ is often replaced by [tai‐dzhi] or [tai‐chi], with the first mispronounced form influenced by the Englishized Pinyin and the second by the earlier form written in the Wade‐Giles system of Romanization.
The evidence presented in this chapter shows that Russian English as an Expanding Circle variety has a legitimate right to be termed a variety per se. By no means should it be associated with deficient learner’s English (Ruslish/Runglish) that can be related to only basilectal or mesolectal performance of English. Russian English as a variety is a broader concept, which is characterized by the acrolectal‐mesolectal‐basilectal continuum. This continuum is a bilingual cline, as has been emphasized by B. Kachru (1983). The bilinguality of the cline manifests features of the languages native to its users and reflects their mentalities and cultures. Depending on the level of performance and the context of the situation, users can have different ranges of transferred language features, some strictly following standards of exonormative models, mostly of British or American English, others deviating from those standards in a more evident way. While speaking about Expanding Circle Englishes like Russian English, we must emphasize the greater variability of the norms their users can follow as soon as those norms are standardized. This leads to a very important pedagogical conclusion: while adapting to a new variety of English to which people are exposed, they use the patterns of speech of that variety (be it American, Australian, Indian, or African), but still the output of speech production will be their own variety as a vehicle verbalizing their mentality and their culture. Thus, the definition of variety is not restricted to specific differential features that only that variety can have. Similar features can pertain to different varieties, but a range of features will always be different as underpinning cultures and languages are diverse.
A variety is not hidden in a geographical pocket, either. The Russian speech community is multicultural, multiethnic, and multiconfessional (to say nothing of gender, age, and social status distinctions). Russian English embraces various cultures, including those of minority languages. They are united in one multinational state and have many common grounds, historical, political and economic; and each ethnicity uses English as a “translingual language” (Canagarajah 2013) to let their cultures and their thoughts be known to others. The term Russian English is, therefore, broad and multifaceted.