“VAM NASLAĬSAT’ ILI PISOM?”

The paper is about English inclusions in the Russian speech of Russian immigrants in the USA in the 21st century.
The author’s aim is to discern as many various models of such inclusions as possible, and try to give explanations of some patterns of these models.
Observations show that the character of these inclusions depends much on the immigrants’ education, on their level of culture, on whether they have previous contact with English language, on the age at which they emigrated, on the entourage they came into at their arrival to the US.
Inclusion of English words (in their Russifi ed phonetic guise and morphological getup) in Russian speech is easily explained in the case that these words denote things that the immigrant has not come across in the old country: “taksy” (taxes), “stoki” or “staki” (stocks), “kesh” (cash), “inshurans” (insurance), etc. (even though their Russian equivalents do exist). The same applies to names of ethnic minorities in the USA: African Americans, Latinos, Chinese, Indians, etc. Russian immigrants deal with this in various ways.
Less understandable are the motives of preference for English words over Russian ones in the case when it’s about things that are well known to the speaker from their life in Russia: “kazin” (cousin), “roch” (cockroach), etc.
The author also gives examples of borrowings that are not explained fully, or not explained at all, by any available model. She hopes to advance in this fi eld in the future.