Seventy-Year History of Sino-Russian Relations through the Prism of Borrowed Vocabulary

Abstract

The purpose and objectives of this study relate to the field of interlanguage contacts and, in particular, to the observation of the process of lexical borrowing as a result of the interaction of non-closely related Russian and Chinese languages. This article discusses the question of the correlation between the nature of Sino-Russian relations and some processes in the vocabulary of the languages of these states. The objective of the study is to identify patterns in the change in the volume and features of borrowed vocabulary, depending on the specifics of the development of interstate relations between China and the USSR, and later the Russian Federation in the period from 1949 to 2022. Within 70 years since the establishment of diplomatic contacts between China and the Soviet Union in 1949, relations between the two countries have gone through three different stages - from warm to cool, and then a period of strategic cooperation - in all areas of public life: humanitarian, scientific, educational, political, military and economic. During these three different periods, the number and nature of Chinese borrowings in Russian and Russian borrowings in Chinese also underwent significant changes. They are reflected in the features of the process of adaptation of borrowed words at the phonetic, grammatical and semantic levels. The frequency of borrowed words use in the period under review in the media texts of both countries is of particular interest. Statistical data on the use of lexemes of Russian origin in Chinese and lexemes of Chinese origin in Russian, obtained from the data of national corpora of the two languages, allow to draw some conclusions about the popularity of certain foreign words at each of the three identified historical stages.