THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 586.

In order to investigate the problem we made up a list of questions (see a questionnaire in Appendix) about using different vocabulary in sensitive topics.The results we got are as follows.

1. Nobody called physically disabled people ‘cripples'. A great number of adults (66%) call these people ‘invalids' but the vast majority of schoolchildren (teenagers) chose the PC variant (physically disabled).

2. The vast majority of respondents (83% of adults and 86% of teens) used ‘mentally challenged' which shows that they are politically correct.

3. Also, a large proportion of adults (66%) and teens (76%) prefer using ‘African-American'.

4. It was a tricky question as there was not a right answer to choose from. That is why about one fourth of teens and one third of adults chose the less offensive ‘dried apricot' (uryuk) but a substantial number of them tried to find their own variant. There were the following answers:

-a person of Caucasian nationality

-a person of foreign nationality

-a foreigner

-an Asian

-national man (‘natsmen')

-not a Russian person who came to make money

The answers are given from more popular to less ones. Though it is a minority, some people try to sound more politically correct.

5. A minority (one third) of adult respondents think that we should address Russian women as ‘a lady' (госпожа), though a great number of teens use more usual ‘woman/girl'

6. A vast majority of teens told that they call a shop assistant (there were only female variants) ‘a girl', while three fourth of adults ‘a shop assistant' in its usual variant.

7. A large proportion of people being asked (60% adults and 62% teens) prefer using ‘Secretary' but the rest chose more modern ‘office manager'.

8. Adult respondents were more sensitive about the so called ‘metabolically challenged' people as two third (65%) of them like using ‘deceased' while nearly half of teens (54%) use ‘dead'.

9. The last two questions were asked in the English language.

It was natural to find out that one third of adults did not know what to choose but unfortunately neither did schoolchildren (45%) though there were two possible answers to choose from ( a/ and c/).

We suppose it can be explained like that:

-the schoolchildren are not taught this at school

-there are no such differences in Russian

-the word ‘everyone' is difficult to refer to a definite gender.

10. It was a surprise to get to know that adults are twice more familiar with ‘Ms' than teens (41 and 33% respectively), though schoolchildren were taught this at school.

To sum up, we can conclude that in many cases all the respondents had the same or similar answers (#2,3,5,7,8,9) while there were differences in #1,6 and 10. And when there is a difference, schoolchildren are more sensitive than adults (#1,4 and#6 –if we think that calling a shop assistant ‘A GIRL' can be a compliment provided she looks much older).

As far as two questions in English are concerned, teenagers need to be more educated about titles and gender pronouns.

Generally speaking, according to periodicals there are two opposite points of view about PC language in our country. The first one is that we do not need it because we have no historical roots for this and that is why we will always call black as ‘black'. The second opinion is that as we live in a global village nowadays, we should be in the know how to communicate with people all over the world and at he same time we should be sensitive and inclusive in our own language because we have got some as similar problems as in many other countries.

All things considered, we strongly believe that being tolerant inside ourselves will help us to choose non-offensive language (it does not matter how to call it) and vice versa.