Anglicisms in Modern Russian Mass Media

In the Russian language today, the process of borrowing foreign lexis is considered the most dynamic due to constantly occurring changes in the social and political situation and thanks to different innovations and new technologies. Typically, mass-media serves as an agent of loanwords as the media is an indicator of various transformations in the language. The aim of this work is to provide insight into the specificity of usage of anglicisms in modern Russian mass-media focused on different social groups. The research is based on the glossy magazine «Vogue» (for February, 2016) and the electronic scientific journal «Apriori» (2015). Thanks to the analysis of English loanwords, which is based on the modern mass-media, it becomes possible to observe the main principles and tendencies of assimilation of anglicisms functioning in Russian. The obtained results will be useful for Russian language scholars and for students of linguistic faculties. After analyzing the statistics of the usage of English loanwords in the magazines «Vogue» and «Apriori», it becomes possible to draw the following conclusions. The usage of anglicisms is more frequent in the glossy magazine (on average, in «Vogue» each page contains 2-3 loanwords, while in «Apriori» there are only 1-2 words). In both sources direct borrowing and calquing serve as the most productive ways of word formation. As for the pragmatic characteristics of anglicisms, as opposed to loanwords in the «Vogue», in the scientific journal there is a tendency to stability of the pragmatic aspect of the word’s semantics. In both magazines the usage of anglicisms, which do not have Russian equivalents, is more frequent in comparison to the loanwords that function on an equal basis with their Russian equivalents.