Variation in first person singular non-past forms of new English borrowings into Russian second conjugation verbs

Abstract

The article examines a sample of nineteen new Russian second conjugation loan verbs with English stems ending in labial and dental consonants and the cluster /st/ (such as strimit’ ‘to stream’, kommentit’ ‘to comment’, frilansit’ ‘to freelance’, and postit’ ‘to post’), and to what extent their first person singular non-past (1 SG) forms undergo normative Russian consonant alternations in the writings of internet users. According to earlier studies (2010–2016), labial stems did not pose problems (alternations, or transitive softening, occurred most of the time), whereas in verbs with dental stems and stems ending in consonant clusters, the 1SG forms largely instantiated plain softening.

To find out if there have been any changes in the tendencies of using transitive softening vs. plain softening, I conducted a series of Google searches 2020–2025 to obtain data on the same verbs from different times. My findings corroborate the results of earlier studies when it comes to stems in different types of consonants and ease of adjusting to the standard consonant alternations. Thus, dental stems and the cluster -st are less easily adjusted than labial stems. However, the results show a clear trend in most of the verbs in my sample: they have gradually moved towards more transitive softening in their 1SG non-past forms and now follow the pattern of normative Russian to a very high degree, although a few verbs still show considerable variation between transitive and plain softening (e.g., kopipastit’ ‘to copy and paste’). Also, a few t- and s-verbs (čatit’sja ‘to chat’; frilansit’ ‘to freelance’) seem to have basically settled with plain softening.