INCREASING THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIO-CULTURAL FACTORS ON THE “RUSSIAN LANGUAGE TODAY”

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries linguists observed an increased influence of socio-cultural processes on language and speech. The democratization and globalization of the most important spheres of society’s life have the most significant impact on modern communication and speech culture. The impact of these processes is ambivalent. The democratization of civil society has certainly contributed to freedom of speech, pluralism of opinions, and an expansion of the range of topics available for public discussion. At the same time, it also led to a change in the perception of reality: denotative fuzziness, diffuion of meanings, postmodern irony. In addition, the infl uence of the democratization process can explain the decline and coarsening of speech (not only in everyday communication and the media, but even in institutional discourse), the condescending attitude of the population towards mistakes, the loosening of linguistic norms under the influence of usage, and the blurring of ideas about the boundaries of what is permissible. On the one hand, the globalization of communication leads to such positive phenomena as the replenishment of the lexical and morphemic composition of the Russian language, the enrichment of the semantic structure of lexemes. On the other hand, we are witnessing the negative effects of the English language and Western culture, which manifest themselves in blind adherence to linguistic “fashion“ and Western communicative patterns, and the clogging of speech with Anglicisms.