Terms of Theory of Generations in Modern Russian Media Discourse and in Youth Speech

Abstract

The article is devoted to Anglicisms-neologisms with the meaning of ‘generation’, which have become quite widespread in modern journalistic discourse and go back to the metalan guage of the “theory of generations” by W. Strauss and N. Howe (lexemes millennials, zoomers, boomers and others). The purpose of the article is to identify how well does native Russian speakers understand the meaning of these words, identify the most common neologisms that claim to be included in the Russian language, compare the data of the National Corpus of the Russian language (NCRL) with the results of a linguistic experiment, describe the meanings of the most common neologisms based on the data of the NCRL, contexts collected by the authors on other Internet resources and conducted linguistic experiments. The article presents the results of two linguistic surveys in which 70 undergraduate students of the humanitarian faculties of Lomonosov Moscow State University participated (35 respondents in each survey). The Survey-1 was aimed at identifying which terms of the “theory of generations” or its Russian adaptations, reproduced by the domestic media, are known to young educated native speakers of the Russian language and are used in speech by them. According to the results of the Survey-1, the words boomers, zoomers, millennials were selected for the Survey-2, which aims to determine the meanings attributed to these words by informants, to identify the level of active ownership. As a result of the Survey-2, a significant discrepancy was found with the quantitative data of the NCRL sample (according to the results of the Survey-2, the most commonly used and mastered word is zoomer, it is the least frequent in the NCRL sample). The word zoomer has the meaning of ‘new generation’, ‘digital generation’, enters into semantic opposition with other generational nominations, mainly with boomers, on the basis of ‘new/ old’, in a number of contexts this opposition is presented as a conflict of fathers and children. The results of linguistic experiments show that relatively common terms break away from the chronological boundaries set in the “theory of generations”: the words boomer and zoomer develop the meanings of ‘parents generation, older generation’ and ‘children’s generation, new generation’. The lexeme millennials is chronologically attributed due to the internal form, however, the generation boundaries indicated by respondents in the surveys differ significantly from those set in the “theory of generations”, the respondents’ answers show a change in meaning from “new generation” to “previous generation”.