The future of the Russian language. The fall of inflections. Exhaustion of the meeting

“Is the Russian language turning into something else?” Exactly. And we are with him, ”says Dmitry Seregin .

Material prepared by the project
Center for Russian Culture Studies

This in itself is natural. But the changes that have been outlined now are deeper than before. For example, when the everyday language of the educated classes was French, the Russian literary language absorbed gallicisms, etc., but these were lexical and phraseological borrowings. Could, say, a new turn appear - tracing paper from French. But the grammar of the language did not affect all this. Today the grammatical framework itself is bending. Specifically, it is already hard not to notice that the case declension system more and more often seems to the native speakers of the Russian language as not mandatory. It is believed that you can do without it, avoiding, for example, declining the names of companies or organizations, even if they are called quite Russian word.

The problematic declension for native speakers of the Russian language was manifested earlier, especially clearly in the declension of complex numerals, and partly long participles, for example, to “-sent”. In the case of the numerals, it could well have come to the point that the case change of one of the words ceased: "One thousand one hundred twenty-three people." But all this, rather, was related to flaws in the linguistic competence of a rather large number of native speakers, although the mere presence of this gap suggests that the linguistic paradigm associated with declination is a burden for those who speak this language.

Now we see a calm, more or less conscious rejection of the paradigm itself. So far - in the case of the names of organizations that are perceived according to the model of unwavering foreign words. But due to the indicated burdensome declension, it can be expected that the zone of abandonment of the case paradigm will expand.

This will entail the progressive degradation of the inflectional system (the system of changing the endings of words) as such. The case matching between a name and a definition (for example, a noun and an adjective) will be increasingly felt as an excessive load on the speaker. Expanding, the process will also affect the verb, which means that indicators of gender, number, and time will be washed out of it.

In the case of names (nouns, adjectives, numerals) or participles, compensation will probably be the strengthening of the position and role of the preposition, based on which the relationship between the name and the verb is determined. In the case of conjugation of the verb, perhaps the compensation will be a more active internal change (not external, but internal inflectivity), just as the verb “take” in the future tense appears in the root “o” - “take it”.

There is no scientific basis for predicting the parallel transformation of the inflectional system of mental transformation. But on an intuitive level, being a native speaker of the Russian language, I imagine such changes.

The fact that our language, with its complex inflectional system, is burdensome for many speakers who inadvertently simplify this system in their everyday speech, speaks of a kind of increased "cost" of producing expressions in it. And this means that the speaker’s attention, in comparison with simpler languages, is more occupied with building speech. It is clear that the more attention is paid to the structure of speech, the less attention remains to its subject.

Therefore, on the surface of phenomena, the conclusion suggests itself that with the fall of the inflectional system, the thinking of its carriers will become more objective - the surrounding things and formulated concepts will be revealed in speech with more perseverance and distinctness. In other words, the decline of inflections will turn into increasing materialism in the sense of the dominance of an object, physical or intellectual.

At the same time, the developed system of endings and word matching within a sentence, the effect of free and flexible bathing in speech, diving and diving from it, creates so many opportunities for nuancing a statement that the loss of this potential will be tragic. Let the subject come to the fore. But a person is not a registrar of objects, but a meeting place with them and the surrounding world as a whole. Accordingly, meetings with the world will become drier, bony and more boring. But this meeting is life.

Personally, I would not want to live in the era of the fall of inflections. But, by the way, we cannot live to its dubious “heyday”. This is just the beginning.