Russian Language Influences

Origins of Russian

It’s impossible to identify exactly when any language is born but scholars agree that Russian became a distinctive language between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time various regional dialects and what is now known as “Old Church Slavonic” — an archaic language used for religious and educational purposes, and which is still used today as the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church — were spoken.

These regional dialects became more acceptable and similar with time as trade between regions increased and a secular literature tradition developed, leading to greater ease and similarity in oral communication and writing. By the time of the seventeenth century, when centralized governance of Russia from Moscow unified the country, Russian finally became the national language.

French had the greatest impact on the history of Russia during this period in its history: it became the unofficial first (and sometimes only!) language of the aristocracy, thereby — by as late as the twentieth century — creating a linguistic divide between the classes: while the aristocracy preferred to speak French, the masses spoke several regional varieties of Russian.

The revolutions further influence language

The Bolshevik Revolution in October of 1917 has been viewed by linguists as yet another turning point in the development of the Russian language: words that were once exclusive to the educated elite entered the everyday lexicon while those that dealt with concepts rooted in political, legal, and military concepts which existed before the revolution suddenly became obsolete.

Even city names changed: St. Petersburg was renamed Leningard, Yekaterinburg became Sverdlovsk, and Volgograd became Stalingard… at least until 1985 when another revolution, known in the West as Perestroika (перестройка, the rebuilding), prompted the return of many pre-revolutionary names. Another important influence of Perestroika on Russian language was the (temporary) end of state censorship: as a result of the policy of glasnost (гласность, openness), censorship over media was lifted and citizens were finally able to engage in discussions of previously taboo subjects, such as open criticism of the political regime and its leaders, spurring renewed discourse throughout the country.

Russian today

Following the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the increasing effects of globalization, Russian language has been assimilating foreign words for international innovations, concepts, and developments, which led to a backlash among Russian language purists like writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who advocated language reforms to ensure the use of native words and prefixes in the creation of Russian equivalents rather than the borrowing from foreign languages.

In fact, the backlash was so strong that laws were enacted to discourage the use of foreign terminology in place of Russian words! However, these measures were anything but effective because, today, ninety-nine percent of current “borrowings” in Russian comes from American English, a fact that should greatly aid an English-speaking student in their comprehension of modern Russian.

Source : 

https://www.lingualift.com/blog/russian-language/