In search of culture non-specific linguistic mechanisms of language adaptation to external cultures

Аннотация

With English functioning as the global lingua franca of the modern world, actively employed to discuss, describe and promote all there is under the heaven, the paper focuses on the linguistic mechanisms of English “re-nationalization”, that is its adaptation to other cultures, originally external to it, which it might be called to describe.

Since the goal of this paper is to illustrate that the secondary cultural orientation of language follows certain general principles and the linguistic mechanisms are the same regardless of the culture being described, we left the culture factor as the only variable (Russian vs. Transoxanian region), restricting the empirical data to texts similar in genre and addressee (culturological research for relatively wide readership) and temporal parameters (time of creation).

The selected empirical data was then analysed on the phono-graphical, lexical and architectonic levels in relation to the way they are affected by the text’s secondary cultural orientation.

The conducted comparison of two independent researches dedicated to the Russian and Transoxanian region’s cultures revealed some striking similarities, which are by no means coincidental. Rather the results summed up in the present paper confirm our hypothesis that a language adaptation to the task of describing an external culture is based on certain strategies; at that both the scope of these strategies and the factors affecting their choice are universal and show no dependence on the culture being described.