DE-RUSSIANISATION OF INTERNATIONALISMS IN THE TAJIK LANGUAGE

During the period of Russian and Soviet domination over Tajikistan there was extensive Russian influence on the Tajik language, which is attested, among other features, by the great number of lexical borrowings. Interestingly, in the case of most of these forms Russian served only as a vehicular language and many are internationalisms, often known well to speakers of various European languages. These words were russianised on their introduction into Russian, before being transmitted on to other languages of Russia / the Soviet Union, Tajik being an example. Thus they often reveal specific Russian features in their morphology, phonology or semantics. The present article deals with a tendency noticeable in the Tajik of today, namely to remove these specific Russian features.