How rich is the Russian language?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

There are three times fewer words in the main Russian dictionary than in Oxford English, but this says little about their actual number.

The first dictionaries of the Russian language began to be compiled at the end of the 18th century. These were dictionaries of church vocabulary, as well as dictionaries of the Academy of Sciences, in which they tried to draw up some kind of map of the origin of all words, starting from their roots. Such dictionaries consisted of less than 50 thousand words.

In the 19th century, Vladimir Dal included more than 200 thousand words in his famous Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. He took as a basis the so-called literary Russian language, which includes commonly used words. He also included Church Slavonic words that were used only in writing. Dahl was the first to collect a huge number of vernaculars - words from colloquial speech.

Left - the first edition of Dahl's dictionary (1863-1866), right - a portrait of Vladimir Dahl by Vasily Perov

In the 20th century, several more dictionaries were compiled - the number of words in them varied from 50 to 120 thousand. There were several editions: among the authors there was no consensus about whether it was necessary to indicate in separate units words derived from others, but having the same root. There are about 40 thousand roots in Russian alone.

In modern Russian

The most relevant and authoritative source on the lexical composition of the modern language is the "Big Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language". 30 volumes contain about 150 thousand words - it is believed that this is exactly how much is used in Russian normative speech.

For comparison - the Oxford English Dictionary contains about 400 thousand words. However, linguists often do not use such comparisons - each dictionary has its own specifics. If only modern words are reflected in the academic dictionary of the Russian language, then in Oxford you can find all words since 1150, including obsolete and dead ones, as well as varieties of the American and Canadian norms.

The dictionaries also do not indicate individual units - for example, forms of adverbs formed from adjectives. That is, there are more real words than dictionary entries. In addition, in Russian there are, for example, about 40 words with the root "love", while in English there are only about five words with the root love.

“If we add dialect words to the 150,000 words of the modern Russian literary language, for example, we will get 400,000 words …” says one of the authors of the academic dictionary, linguist Lyudmila Kruglikova.

Are all words used?

But does every Russian use at least 150 thousand words? Of course not. It is believed that the average vocabulary of an educated person is about 10 thousand words, while only about 2 thousand are in active use. Professionals using specialized vocabulary may have about 2,000 more such words in the vocabulary.

One of the record holders for the use of words is Alexander Pushkin. In the middle of the XX century, the "Dictionary of the Pushkin Language" was published, on which they worked for more than a decade. After analyzing all the poet's work, as well as letters, business papers and drafts of works, the compilers included about 21 thousand words in the dictionary.

Thomas Wright. Portrait of Alexander Pushkin

It is Pushkin who is usually called the creator of the modern literary language. He introduced vernacular words into written speech that were not previously used, and reduced the general high-flown tone adopted in written speech before him.

How many of them are foreign?

The Russian language has absorbed borrowings from many others: Greek words came with the spread of Christianity, Turkic - because of neighborhood and assimilation. Under Peter I, there was an influx of European words in various areas of science, navigation and other spheres of life.

J. Michel "Peter I in Zaandam" (Holland), engraving

In the 19th century, French became practically the second language of the nobility in Russia. It is significant that in Pushkin's language about 6% of words are borrowings. As scientists found, in the poet's syllable, 52% of the borrowings came from the French language, about 40% from German and only 3.6% were Anglicisms.

In the USSR, the "Dictionary of Foreign Words" was published; it included about 23 thousand samples of foreign origin. The 2014 Russian Dictionary of Foreign Words already includes 100 thousand.

In the 20th century, in the Russian language, Anglicisms came out on top among borrowings, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they only became more numerous. It is believed that in modern Russian more than half of the words are borrowed and about 70% of them are English. The number of borrowed words is constantly growing.

A huge number of words that have been borrowed from the 90s to this day are associated with computer technology - Alexey Fedoseev / Sputnik

Linguists believe that the new words relate mainly to professional and special spheres, but they are increasingly entering the language.

“Foreign words adapt to the system, borrowed roots are overgrown with Russian affixes, for example: post, smiley, okey, like, and even pasted,” notes Kruglikova.