ABSTRACT:
The revolutionary changes in the Russian society of the last two decades have caused some considerable changes in the language. In recent years much scholarly attention has been devoted to the problem of new conditions of language functioning, such as liberalization in both social life and language usage, the abolition of censorship and auto-censorship and some other. Spontaneous public speech demonstrates vividly the new tendencies taking place on different levels of the Russian language. The most obvious and noticeable changes can be observed on the lexical level. New social conditions bring to life new words (mainly borrowed from English). The borrowings supply the need for nomination of new realities which came into Russian society with perestroyka. At the same time many Russian words of the Soviet times should be considered as "historisms" nowadays. The report is based on the recent works of Russian scholars and own observations of the author.
