From commodification to weaponization: the Russian language as ‘pride’ and ‘profit’ in Russia's transnational discourses

ABSTRACT

The article expands the debate about the interaction and conflict of linguistic commodification with other values attached to a language. It interrogates Russian dominant discourse produced between 2010 and 2015, focusing on how it attributes the values of ‘pride’ and ‘profit’ to the Russian language in three transnational contexts: the narrative of ‘compatriots’ outside Russia, the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. It argues that the discursive construction of Russian as a means for material advancement is constantly intertwined with manufacturing the transnational semantics of belonging to Russia (the transnational ‘pride’). This is often overlaid with the instrumental value-attribution for Russian for establishing and perpetuating power relations, exerting control and, finally, warmongering.

KEYWORDS:

• Linguistic commodification
• discourse
• Russian
• transnational
• globalization
• weaponization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These include, for example, the Izborsk Club (a conservative and Russian nationalist and imperialist think-tank close to the Kremlin, see http://www.dynacon.ru/index.php); the staunch conservative newspaper Zavtra and the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (a Kremlin think-tank which was founded in the place of a former branch of Russia's foreign intelligence service, see for e.g. Volchek 2015).

2 All translation from Russian in this article is by the present author.

3 Rossotrudnichestvo emerged on the old structures of Roszarubezhtsentr (see Saari 2014, 61). 

4 See an example provided in the National Corpus of Russian: Американцы в течение нескольких последних лет настойчиво требовали от Финляндии усилить военное присутствие в Афганистане. [During the recent years, the Americans demanded that Finland strengthens its military deployment in Afghanistan] (Komsomol'skaia pravda, 1 March 2011), http://www.ruscorpora.ru/.

5 русский народ стал одним из самых больших, если не сказать, самым большим разделённым народом в мире.