WEB-ресурс научно-практических конференций

Sumskaya V.

RUNGLISH AS THE PHENOMENON OF MIXING LANGUAGES

In the process of world globalization we can easily notice mixing of national cultures, special features of definite nations etc. The edge between absolutely different countries, cultures and lifestyles is not as sharp as it used to be before.

Due to its being so wide-spread, English became the most popular language in the world. This fact caused appearing of a brand new language phenomenon such as mixing. Characteristic features and peculiarities of this phenomenon will be seen on the example of Runglish which is a mix of Russian and English languages.

Runglish is considered to be a neologism used to denote English language with Russian manner. Firstly this definition was used in 1982 by Arthur Clarke in his novel “2010: Odyssey Two” where he described a new language that was spoken by Russian and English cosmonauts that during their flight began to mix their languages.

From the linguistic point of view Runglish is a mixed language or “pseudo-dialect ”. Some linguists consider it to be a translation from the mother tongue at the level of lexical units; therefore it has neither adequacy, nor equivalency. In such pseudo-dialects no attention is paid to background knowledge or cultural aspects.

According to other sources Runglish i s a neologism used to denote at least three different interferences of Russian and English: pidgin , informal latinizations of the Cyrillic alphabet and spoken manner .

Pidgin Runglish was firstly used in 2000 on the Earth orbit by Russian cosmonauts in their conversation with American colleagues.

Since the term " Runglish " entered circulation, it has been increasingly used to denote what was earlier known as Volapuk encoding: the transliterating of Russian-language texts using the Latin alphabet .

" Runglish " is also used informally to describe the variety of English spoken manner of native Russian speakers . Distinctive features of Runglish may be noticed in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and in all cases reflect the respective features of Russian being applied to English.

There some peculiarities of pronunciation, for example:

· Runglish feel no difference between long and short, open and closed vowels, so one cannot distinguish heat [ hi:t ] and hit [ h ? t ], port [ p ? :t ] and pot [ p ? t ];

· in the end of the word there is also no difference between voiced and voiceless consonants, for example, dock and dog , hard and heart are the same in Runglish pronunciation;

· in Runglish there are no sounds like [?] and [?], such words as thing and then are pronounced like [ si? ] and [ zen ].

As for grammar, Runglish rules seem to be a pathetic parody of strict rules of English grammar:

· In Runglish there is confusion in using articles. Eventually, there are no articles in Russian, so, the “native speakers” of Runglish use them improperly;

· Runglish speakers use plural form instead of singular and vice versa:

People is working.

Your advices are good ;

· Runglish doesn’t have Perfect Tenses; the speech is oversimplified to using Simple Tenses and rarely Continuous:

I lost my umbrella, did you see it?

Instead of :

I’d lost my umbrella, have you seen it? ;

· No attention is paid to the semantic shades of modal verbs;

· In Runglish sentence there can be two or even three negations that is categorically inadmissible in English grammar;

· English words can easily became a root for Russian word thus forming a neologism:

Дай я по драйв ю . ( to drive )

Можно я твой карандаш по юз аю ? (to use).

Nowadays this linguistic problem is very pressing. It is not completely studied by the linguists so it is necessary to perform further investigation. This pseudodialect appeared not so long ago but it wins peoples’ sympathy more and more. It’s very interesting to witness the development of this young “language” and to investigate all the changes in the process of its evolution.

As anglicisms begin to penetrate rapidly into Russian via immigrants, tourists, English broadcasting and, certainly, via Internet after the birth of this mixture, day after day it becomes more and more popular among young people, especially Internet users.

On the other hand, having such a mix of languages, it’s necessary to think over about the purity of the languages, about their peculiarities, and to prevent popularization of such a strange phenomenon which appeared because of lack of the knowledge.

Today Runglish is regarded as a real threat for the purity of the language which is caused by a great quantity on non-Russian origin of the words that is why Runglish sometimes can be sneered with scepticism.

References

1. http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ruwiki/6161

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runglish

4. http://infoenglish.info/publ/1-1-0-292

5. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Английский_язык

6. http://www.25frame.ru/Article/english.htm

7. http://www.langues.ru/beta/?p=207

8. http://www.ukisok.ru/language/214.htm