The Integration of English Loanwords in Russian: An Overview of Recent Borrowings

The aim of this study is to analyze the main tendencies prevailing in the orthographic, phonological, morphological as well as semantic adaptation of loanwords of English origin that entered the Russian language in the past two and a half decades, i.e. between the mid-1980s and now. Fully adapted English borrowings are excluded from the analysis, the aim of which is to give a detailed account of the dynamics of the borrowing process and ways in which borrowing mechanisms work. In addition to the linguistic description of the data, it is essential to discuss the role of monolingual and bilingual speakers in borrowing (the social background that initiates and determines the adoption of English loanwords), along with the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of the process. The latter include the description of motivations (i.e. which non-linguistic factors affect and explain the influx of elements of English origin). The main emphasis of the paper is on the linguistic analysis of English borrowings in a contact linguistic and lexicological framework.