TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF (POST)IMPERIAL BORROWINGS: RUSSIANISMS IN LATVIAN SLANG

Languages in contact with Russian on the territory of the (former) USSR can be seen as a particular case of (post)imperial and — more widely — (post)colonial language situations. The present paper focuses on the post-imperial situation in Latvia and explains sociolinguistic drift of Russianisms in Latvian, i. e. of a change in the direction of Russian-Latvian transfer due to the change in the status of both languages in the post-Soviet period: Russian as the language of the abolished imperial power and Latvian as the new state language. Thereby, the correlations between chronological, sociolinguistic and semantic trajectories of Russianisms in Latvian in the Soviet and post-Soviet period have been identified on the base of the Dictionary of Latvian Slang (2006). 
The analysis of data confirms our hypotheses of sociolinguistic drift of Russia nisms: 1) The status and prestige of the donor language determine both the dominant source stratum and the target stratum of borrowings in the recipient language; 2) When the status and prestige of the donor language changes, both the set of source stratums of borrowings in the donor language and the vector of their transfer to the recipient language change. Moreover, the reasons for lexical transfer in a dynamic post-imperial language situation that is undergoing a sociolinguistic shift (i. e. in Latvia) turn out to be more complex than in imperial situations. The paper further identifies both the specific factors that determine interlingual transfer involving the Russian donor language in the post-Soviet space, and the factors that bring the fate of the Russian language closer to other postcolonial languages.