Russian borrowings in Tuvan colloquial speech

Abstract

This paper investigates the historical evolution of the Tuvan-Russian/Russian-Tuvan bilingualism and its current state in the Tuva Republic. In 1974, B. I. Tatarintsev examined bilingualism and Russian loanwords in the Tuvan language and identified three periods of linguistic borrowing. Here, we propose a classification of new periods in the history of Tuvan-Russian bilingualism: the 4th (1993–2015) and the 5th (from 2015 to the present time). These periods can be differentiated by the changes in the functional relations between the Russian and the Tuvan languages in national republics of the Russian Federation, including the Tuva Republic, following the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s. The recent trend of globalization has contributed to the expansion of the Russian language’s functions and its dominance in everyday life and official communication. Tuvan, being primarily used in informal communication or within families, is becoming more colloquial. This paper demonstrates the influence of Russian on Tuvan through the emergence of new ways of word formation with evaluative meanings and the occurrence of semantic shifts in various Russian loanwords. Verbs are frequently derived from Russian stems, and Russian adverbs are sometimes used in Tuvan speech. Moreover, it is important to highlight the escalating number of loanwords in recent decades and the discernible influence of Russian on oral Tuvan. To substantiate our findings, we utilize oral speech records and examples of posts in VKontakte and Facebook, where informal communication between native speakers commonly takes place.