Spouses addressing their parents-in-law in Russian culture

The paper examines the forms of addressing the nearest in-law relatives existing in Russian family communication. Addresses to family members are among the oldest means of appealing and are marked by national identity in any culture. The Russian culture undoubtedly has its own traditions, norms and rules for choosing family addresses, which change under the influence of extralinguistic and linguistic factors, since the address is generally by its nature a “flexible” and frequent unit of language and speech, actively reacting to various kinds of social and linguistic transformations. By analyzing examples from literature and other sources, the authors identify key forms of address for in-laws in the Russian culture at different points in time. The article brings up an issue of whether the tradition of addressing a father-in-law, a mother-in-law as one’s parents has been lost in modern everyday communication; the authors register which forms of addressing the in-laws are used by the modern Russian speakers, which preferences can be observed nowadays, given that the pragmatic informativeness of the address is associated with “you” (thou) or “you” registers of communication. Using the data from the survey of the residents of a Volga region of Russia, the article outlines the forms of address used in modern-day family communication and proposes a framework for categorizing forms of addressing parents-in-law; it also characterizes the traditions and strategies which determine their choice in the modern society.