Neologisms

The radical changes in Russian life since the mid-1980s, the sudden greatly increased exposure to Western influence, and the introduction of large numbers of new institutions, habits and concepts have led to the flooding of the Russian language with neologisms. These neologisms relate to almost every area of life, but are especially numerous in such fields as politics, economics, social problems, law and order, science and technology, education, culture, sport and fashion.

Many of the neologisms are loanwords from other languages, nowadays mainly from English. Neologisms of this type may require slight phonetic adaptation, especially when the English word contains the letter c followed by e or i, e.g. геноцйд, genocide. The majority of them are absorbed into Russian without morphological adaptation, if they are nouns (e.g. брйфинг, briefing), although some (especially those ending in -и) will be indeclinable (e.g. паблйсити (n) publicity). However, the adjectives and verbs among loanwords, and also many borrowed nouns, require the addition of Russian affixes to the foreign root (e.g. вертикáльный, top-down (of management); митинговáть, to take part in meetings (R1, pej); са̀мофинансийрование, self-financing).

Many other neologisms are derived from existing Russian resources by various means, including composition of acronyms (e.g. бомж, vagrant), affixation (e.g. теневйк, person who operates in the shadow economy) and polysemanticisation (e.g. отмывáть/отмíть, to launder (money)), perhaps on the basis of some foreign model (e.g. я́стреб, hawk, used in a figurative sense).