THE FIRST ACADEMIC RESEARCH PROJECT ON SPOKEN RUSSIAN: LINGUISTIC DISCOVERIES AND SOCIO-CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES

The article reveals the signifi cance of the academic research of Russian colloquial speech (spoken oral language), which was started at the Institute of Russian Language of the Academy of Sciences in 1968, implemented in a number of conferences and 4 collectivemonographs in 1973–1983, and which made spoken language the subject of constant sociolinguistic attention. Although already in 1935, in the introduction to the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language,” ed. By D. N. Ushakov, “colloquial speech ofeducated people” was defi ned as one of two forms of standard language — along with itsformal (offi cial) variant [column XXI], however, until the academic Grammar 1970 was published, sentence patterns of colloquial syntax were not yet considered acceptable in standardized speech. The article highlights the most striking features of colloquial speech discovered by the fi rst researchers; the methodological innovation of the Project is shown as well: new tools of empirical analysis — hardware, logical and conceptual and terminological; turning to methods for statistically assessing the relevance of quantitative data; development of linguistic infographics.
The social meaning of the Project was the cultural legitimation of a modern democratic conception of standard (normative) language, according to which spoken language, informal and non-public communication of people with secondary education, was included in the normative linguistic space. This productive and optimistic project had an undoubted “thaw”, democratic and liberalizing signifi cance.